The Next 31 Years of Developing Unum

When I was 20, I committed the next 40 years of my life to AI, approaching it from the infrastructure perspective. In 2015, before ChatGPT and the AI surge, such a long-term commitment seemed naive to many — almost like proposing marriage on a second date — the move I am most proud of.

Yesterday, Unum celebrated its 9th anniversary, and my open-source contributions have surpassed 9,000 stars on GitHub. To mark the occasion, as I’ve done before, I’m releasing something new, free, and practical for the scientific community: efficient Bilinear Forms for real and complex numbers. These are useful in fields like statistics, computational physics, biology, or chemistry. These kernels may offer up to 5x improvements in mixed-precision throughput compared to BLAS and other libraries that power tools like NumPy, especially for simulating the time evolution of small systems of non-entangled quantum states. If you’re curious about Bilinear Forms, you can check the release notes of the SimSIMD project.

On a more personal note, founding, funding, and building Unum was the second-best decision of my life. It cost me my physics degree, meaning I can’t formally teach in most universities. It drained my finances as I learned how to hire and fire people, and “how not to sell” products. Over the past nine years, I’ve moved more times than I can count, witnessed wars, lost loved ones, opened and closed offices, failed countless fundraisers, and started over repeatedly.

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