expectedwrong hindsight

Jim Keller Shipped the Cards

Tenstorrent's Wormhole hardware drops and the open-source AI stack suddenly needs a floor.

2 min read 223 words #hardware #tenstorrent #ai #open-source
hindsight — half right

tenstorrent raised $693M, hit $2.6B valuation, and shipped the blackhole card at $1,399. jim keller is building for 2027-2030. but nvidia is still the only game that matters for now. the open toolchain dream is alive but not yet winning.

There is a moment in every open-source AI hobby arc where the software stops being the constraint.

You've got llama.cpp, you've got Ollama, you've got a weight file for something that would have required a research lab two years ago — and then you look at what's actually running it and it's a consumer GPU doing its best, or you're waiting on cloud inference from a company that may or may not exist in eighteen months, and you realize: the software was never the hard part. The hard part is that NVIDIA is the only game and they know it.

Tenstorrent just dropped their cards. Jim Keller's company. The guy who designed the chips in your phone and your CPU and probably something in your car. Open toolchain, RISC-V cores underneath, priced like they actually want people to buy them.

I'm not buying first wave. New silicon in the first month means you're essentially paying to find the driver bugs — which is fine if you want that, it's just not what I want right now. Let the enthusiasts sort out the rough edges. Let the benchmarks exist. Then decide.

But the fact that this exists at all, this quickly — that's the thing. The software-only era of the open AI stack has a natural ceiling, and someone just started building the ladder.