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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to We Beat MLPerf: Modern Storage for KV Offload and LLM Training

High performance storage engine for efficient LLM inference and GPU Training.

OpenLake's Infinity Core I/O Engine is a storage system designed for large language model inference and GPU training workloads. It delivers high-speed read and write performance for checkpoint operations, achieving… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Hey HN, we’re the developers of OpenLake, an open source storage engine for offloading LLM KV caches from GPU memory into a shared tier of RAM and NVMe. We built OpenLake because KV caches are outgrowing GPU memory. A single 256K token conversation on Gemma 4 31B produces approximately 43GB of KV state, more than half the memory of an 80GB H100. The problem becomes even harder across a cluster: a prefix cached on one GPU host is unavailable when the next request lands on a different GPU, forcing the new GPU to repeat work the fleet has already completed. Once the KV cache is offloaded,…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5WM

    Try it out! https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glhf.chat&#x2F; 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 →

  6. 6

    I've been building ZSE (Z Server Engine) for the past few weeks — an open-source LLM inference engine focused on two things nobody has fully solved together: memory efficiency and fast cold starts. The problem I was trying to solve: Running a 32B model normally requires ~64 GB VRAM. Most developers don't have that. And even when quantization helps with memory, cold starts with bitsandbytes NF4 take 2+ minutes on first load and 45–120 seconds on warm restarts — which kills serverless and autoscaling use cases. What ZSE does differently: Fits 32B in 19.3 GB VRAM (70% reduction vs FP16) — runs…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hey HN, I am the founder of Tensorlake. Prototyping LLM applications have become a lot easier, building decision making LLM applications that work on constantly updating data is still very challenging in production settings. The systems engineering problems that we have seen people face are - 1. Reliably process ingested content in real time if the application is sensitive to freshness of information. 2. Being able to bring in any kind of model, and run different parts of the pipeline on GPUs and CPUs. 3. Fault Tolerance to ingestion spike, compute infrastructure failure. 4. Scaling compute,…

    2024 · getindexify.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Here's a project I've been working on for the last few months. It's a new (I think) algorithm, that allows to adjust smoothly - and in real time - how many calculations you'd like to do during inference of an LLM model. It seems that it's possible to do just 20-25% of weight multiplications instead of all of them, and still get good inference results. I implemented it to run on M1&#x2F;M2&#x2F;M3 GPU. The mmul approximation itself can be pushed to run 2x fast before the quality of output collapses. The inference speed is just a bit faster than Llama.cpp's, because the rest of implementation…

    2024 · asciinema.org · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Groq®▲237

    Hyperfast LLM running on custom built GPUs

    2024 · groq.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    AI models that run on an inference cloud optimized for speed

    May 2026 · generalcompute.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    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 →

  14. 14

    Contribute to Mega4alik/ollm development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15TC

    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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tensordock.com&#x2F;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 →

  16. 16

    A simple calculator that estimates how many concurrent requests your GPU can handle for a given LLM, with shareable results.

    2025 · selfhostllm.org · its alternatives →

  17. 17IB

    We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…

    2025 · tinytpu.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    A high-performance RDMA distributed file system for fast LLM Inference and GPU Training. - GitHub - blackbird-io/blackbird: A high-performance RDMA distributed file system for fast LLM Inference and GPU Training.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN, I built OpenGraviton, an open-source AI inference engine that pushes the limits of running extremely large LLMs on consumer hardware. By combining 1.58-bit ternary quantization, dynamic sparsity with Top-K pruning and MoE routing, and mmap-based layer streaming, OpenGraviton can run models far larger than your system RAM—even on a Mac Mini. Early benchmarks: TinyLlama-1.1B drops from ~2GB (FP16) to ~0.24GB with ternary quantization. At 140B scale, models that normally require ~280GB fit within ~35GB packed. Optimized for Apple Silicon with Metal + C++ tensor unpacking, plus…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Minimal, readable LLM post-training experiments on one 8GB GPU. Measures forgetting, seed variance, and RL emergence. - pochenai/nano-llm-posttraining

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    This is a low-level opensource library I developed for my own use and decided to share, as it makes it possible to process large checkpoints of neural networks without renting high-RAM instances, on a regular PC. It replaces torch.load() with a custom function that produces a dictionary that materializes tensors on the fly. Compared to other solutions it doesn't require sharding or re-encoding checkpoints and uses them completely as-is. It is a foundation to make it possible to run inference and compress language models and other large models one layer at a time - in principle, even one…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22BA

    Hi HN, Erik here. Today we launch Butter, an OpenAI-compatible API proxy that caches LLM generations and serves them deterministically on revisit. Since April, we’ve been working on this concept of “muscle memory,” or deterministic replay, for agent systems performing automations. You may recall our first post in May, launching a python package called Muscle Mem: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43988381 Since then, the product has evolved entirely, now taking the form of an LLM Proxy. For a deep dive into this process, check out:…

    2025 · docs.butter.dev · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    100% bootstrapped new startup. It lets you fine tune Mistral-7B and SDXL. In particular, for the LLM fine tuning we implemented a dataprep pipeline that turns websites&#x2F;pdfs&#x2F;doc files into question-answer pairs for training the small LLM using an big LLM. It includes a GPU scheduler that can do finegrained GPU memory scheduling (Kubernetes can only do whole-GPU, we do it per-GB of GPU memory to pack both inference and fine tuning jobs into the same fleet) to fit model instances into GPU memory to optimally trade off user facing latency with GPU memory utilization It's a pretty…

    2023 · docs.helix.ml · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    runNburn is an Apache-2.0 Rust inference engine for quantized GGUF models that are too big for your fast memory. The core idea: weights stay file-backed (mmap), host residency stays under an explicit byte budget (--ram-budget), and GPU caches are sized from detected free&#x2F;total VRAM — never from device-name presets. There is no conversion step, no sidecar cache files, no silent requantization. The GGUF on disk is the single source of truth. The result that made me want to post this: Tencent's Hy3 (295B total &#x2F; 21B active sparse MoE, a single 97.8 GiB Q2_K GGUF) runs on my desktop…

    Jul 2026 · 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 →