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Comment by 0xpgm | Hacker News Reader

I might be reading this differently, but isn't the acquisition a bet that Modular will become a manufacturer-agnostic software stack?

> "We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said.

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I also believe this. And I think very few people can pull it off, and Chris Latt ner is precisely one of them. I hope that the agreement includes open sourcing Mojo at some point. Chris mentioned fall 2026, iirc.

Mojo compiler will be open in August.

TODO: license-wash via LLM

I'm not sure I follow. Modular open source uses Apache 2 with LLVM Exceptions: https://github.com/modular/modular?tab=License-1-ov-file

one of the reasons I rarely read press releases is that I don't believe in promises -- I believe in _incentives_. In this case, what will Qualcomm be incentivized to do? What are in their interests?

Qualcomm has an enormous incentive in breaking Nvidia's CUDA grip on GPU programming.

Having Mojo support multiple platforms creates incentive to adopt Mojo and therefore write code in a language which can compile and run on Qualcomm hardware. This is good for Qualcomm.

However the danger is that the language sees wide adoption but nobody uses it with Qualcomm hardware. Instead it might encourage people to buy AMD. This is a terrible outcome for Qualcomm. They paid to boost someone else's sales.

So the incentive is to make sure it runs best on Qualcomm and to at least slightly hobble other hardware. But the safest thing overall is to support Nvidia, Qualcomm, and that's it.

I think a strategy for Qualcomm would be to use Mojo and Max as a software platform to drive AI inference on ARMv9 chips such as Snapdragon either at the edge (your smartphone) or in the cloud.

Ok, what will be Qualcomm incentive? Selling few hundred Mojo license for few thousand dollars each. Or making it open source hoping it may make big in AI / data science community and may help sell more Qualcomm hardware?

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