KernelBot: The World's First Competitive GPU Programming Platform

Lightning Talk: KernelBot: The World’s First Competitive GPU Programming Platform - Mark Saroufim, Meta KernelBot is a competitive platform that showcases the power of community-driven innovation, hosted on GPU MODE’s vibrant ecosystem of 17K developers. Our platform democratizes state-of-the-art kernel authoring by bringing together GPU programmers from diverse backgrounds to collaboratively push the boundaries of performance optimization. What began as an effort to aggregate high-quality kernel tokens for LLM code generation has evolved into a thriving community movement with over 25K submissions and $100K in prizepools, where community contributors are now outperforming optimized commercial baselines. The success of this vendor-neutral platform stems from our commitment to making cutting-edge kernel development accessible to everyone. Community members leverage our fast PyTorch cold starts to iterate rapidly while we maintain minimal infrastructure barriers. By standardizing on PyTorch tensors as inputs, we’ve created a common foundation that allows the fastest libraries to shine regardless of their origin. Our community’s achievements extend beyond individual competitions—we’re open-sourcing the top-performing kernels so the entire ecosystem can learn from these innovations.