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AI · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to PlaidML, open source deep learning for any GPU

Our company Vertex.AI has been working on this for a while but this is the first public release. We're starting with using PlaidML to bring OpenCL support to Keras and more frameworks, platforms, etc are coming. Yes, this means you can use use your AMD GPU for deep learning dev. Sorry, no Mac or Windows support yet although the brave can try building from source (it should work). http://vertex.ai/blog/announcing-plaidml https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml

PlaidML is an open-source deep learning framework that enables GPU acceleration through OpenCL support, allowing developers to use AMD and other GPUs for machine learning work. It integrates with Keras and is designed… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. PlaidML, open source deep learning for any GPU launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    StackML▲252

    Machine Learning platform in-browser, for creators

    2019 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Open-source machine learning library by Google

    2017 · tensorflow.org · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi everyone, I'm kinda involved in some retrogaming and with some experiments I ran into the following question: "It would be possible to run transformer models bypassing the cpu/ram, connecting the gpu to the nvme?" This is the result of that question itself and some weekend vibecoding (it has the linked library repository in the readme as well), it seems to work, even on consumer gpus, it should work better on professional ones tho

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    CUDA is NVIDIA's language for GPU programming, allowing you to mix write CPU and GPU code in C++ in one file. By chaining a few projects that compile CUDA to OpenCL, then Vulkan, then WebGPU, you can experiment with this GPGPU language on any hardware.

    2025 · hipscript.lights0123.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN, Over the past few months, I've been building `dsc`, a tensor library from scratch in C++/CUDA. My main focus has been on getting the basics right, prioritizing a clean API, simplicity, and clear observability for running small LLMs locally. The key features are: - C++ core with CUDA support written from scratch. - A familiar, PyTorch-like Python API. - Runs real models: it's complete enough to load a model like Qwen from HuggingFace and run inference on both CUDA and CPU with a single line change[1]. - Simple, built-in observability for both Python and C++. Next on the roadmap is…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    This started out as a personal effort to learn more about machine learning. It's currently a CLI app where you give it a JSON file specifying your network architecture and hyperparameters and point it to your training data, then invoke it again in 'eval' mode with some data it's not seen before and it will try to classify each sample. I don't see many other people using Vulkan for GPGPU, and there may be many good reasons for that, but I wanted to try something a bit different. I've made every attempt to make the code very clean and readable and I've written up the math in…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    MakeML▲274

    Train Neural Networks without a line of code

    2019 · makeml.app · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Massive local model speedup on Apple Silicon with MLX

    Apr 2026 · ollama.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I ported Microsoft's TRELLIS.2 (4B parameter image-to-3D model) to run on Apple Silicon via PyTorch MPS. The original requires CUDA with flash_attn, nvdiffrast, and custom sparse convolution kernels: none of which work on Mac. I replaced the CUDA-specific ops with pure-PyTorch alternatives: a gather-scatter sparse 3D convolution, SDPA attention for sparse transformers, and a Python-based mesh extraction replacing CUDA hashmap operations. Total changes are a few hundred lines across 9 files. Generates ~400K vertex meshes from single photos in about 3.5 minutes on M4 Pro (24GB). Not as fast as…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    An on-premises, bare-metal solution for deploying GPU-powered applications in containers - emergingstack/es-dev-stack

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11WM

    Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…

    2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hi HN, We just opened public access to Qwen3‑Coder‑480B‑A35B‑Instruct via a REST/SDK API. Why it might be interesting: - Fully open-source (Apache‑2.0): https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-Coder - 480B params (35B active MoE), long context up to 1M tokens with YaRN - Matches Claude Sonnet/GPT‑4o on SWE-Bench Verified (81.6%) - Free tier: 100K tokens/month

    2023 · netmind.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    ML dev tool that saves you up to 8x in cloud GPU costs

    2019 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Help teams apply machine learning to real-world applications

    2017 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    The easiest way to use cloud GPUs

    2025 · tensorpool.dev · its alternatives →

  17. 17IM
  18. 18
    Apple MLX▲138

    An array framework for machine learning on Apple silicon

    2023 · pypi.org · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Easy to use and fairly priced GPUs for Machine Learning

    2019 · clevergrid.io · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    RightNow▲197

    AI code editor for GPU kernel development

    Dec 2025 · its alternatives →

  21. 21TC

    Hello HN! I’m Jonathan from TensorDock. After 7 months in beta, we’re finally launching Core Cloud, our platform to deploy GPU virtual machines in as little as 45 seconds! https://www.tensordock.com/product-core Why? Training machine learning workloads at large clouds can be extremely expensive. This left us wondering, “how did cloud ever become more expensive than on-prem?” I’ve seen too many ML startups buy their own hardware. Cheaper dedicated servers with NVIDIA GPUs are not too hard to find, but they lack the functionality and scalability of the big clouds. We thought to…

    2022 · tensordock.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22AG

    This is a vector index I built that supports insertion and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) querying, optimized for GPUs. It operates entirely in CUDA and can process queries on half a billion vectors in under 200 milliseconds. The codebase is structured as a standalone library with an HTTP API for remote access. It’s intended for high-performance search tasks—think similarity search, AI model retrieval, or reinforcement learning replay buffers. The codebase is located at https://github.com/rodlaf/BinaryGPUIndex.

    2025 · rlafuente.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Fine-tune LLMs from one YAML. Layer streaming trains an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU. - MakazhanAlpamys/Soup

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Multi-GPU reinforcement learning using Deep Q-Network in TensorFlow for OpenAI Gym - vishar0/dist-dqn

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →