Alibaba open-sources its AI chip software stack at WAIC, targeting Nvidia’s CUDA lock-in

TL;DR Alibaba’s T-Head open-sourced SAIL, the software stack for its Zhenwu AI chips, at WAIC in Shanghai. It aims to lower the barrier to migrating off Nvidia’s CUDA. Alibaba’s chip design unit T-Head announced at the World AI Conference in Shanghai on Saturday that it is open-sourcing SAIL, the full software stack for its Zhenwu series of AI chips. The move is designed to lower migration barriers for developers currently locked into Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem. T-Head said programmers can adapt SAIL to mainstream AI frameworks in under seven days. The vast majority of AI developers globally write software using CUDA,…