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Mixture-of-Kittens - Cursor's Open-Source MoE Training Kernel
EP 21 NEW RELEASE GitHub Aug 22, 2026 5 min

Mixture-of-Kittens: Cursor Open-Sourced Their MoE Training Kernel

An IDE company just published the production MoE training megakernel behind their Composer models. It fuses all communication and computation into a single deterministic kernel. 2.37x faster than DeepSeek. Apache 2.0.

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// TL;DR

Cursor open-sourced the MoE training kernel behind their Composer models. 2.37x faster than DeepSeek's DeepEP. Fuses all communication and computation into a single deterministic kernel. No CPU-GPU sync. Bitwise-identical results every run. Already training on tens of thousands of GPUs. Apache 2.0.

# The MoE Bottleneck

MoE layers are the bottleneck in large-scale training. Tokens bounce between GPUs and experts through separate kernel launches. Every boundary means a CPU-GPU sync, a scheduling delay, and wasted compute.

Before (Separate Kernels)
Token input
Kernel 1: All-to-all dispatch
GPU sync
Kernel 2: Expert compute
GPU sync
Kernel 3: All-to-all combine
Output
After (MoK Megakernel)
Token input
SINGLE MoK MEGAKERNEL All-to-all dispatch + Expert compute + All-to-all combine Zero CPU-GPU sync
Output
KEY INSIGHT

MoK collapses the entire dispatch-compute-combine chain into one kernel. No kernel launch boundaries. No CPU-GPU synchronization points. The result: bitwise-identical outputs every run, which makes debugging distributed training actually possible.

# The Numbers

2.37x
MXFP8 Forward Throughput
1.41x
End-to-End Speedup
512
GPUs Benchmarked
10,000s
GPUs in Production
Bitwise
Deterministic
487
GitHub Stars
MoK (Cursor) Apache 2.0
2.37xthroughput
Bitwisedeterministic
DeepEP (DeepSeek) MIT
1.0xthroughput
Nodeterministic
HybridEP + Megatron Proprietary
~1.0xthroughput
Nodeterministic

# How It Works

MoK fuses all-to-all dispatch, expert computation, and all-to-all combine into a single kernel with overlapped communication. Built specifically for GB300 NVL72 racks - 72 GPUs in one NVLink domain.

Fused Megakernel

All MoE communication and computation runs in one kernel launch. No scheduling boundaries. Uses Blackwell's Cluster Launch for scheduling across the NVLink domain.

🔎

Bitwise Determinism

Same inputs produce identical outputs every run. No floating-point non-determinism from async communication. Makes debugging at scale tractable.

📈

Dual Precision

Supports both BF16 and MXFP8 precision modes. Router weight gradients computed via SonicMoE-style calculation fused into SwiGLU backward pass.

💻

Hardware Requirements

NVIDIA Blackwell SM100/SM103 GPUs. Python 3.12+. PyTorch 2.10+. CUDA 13.0+. Designed for NVL72 rack topology.

AUTHORS

Stuart H. Sul, Nash Brown, Henry Wildermuth, William Lin, and Federico Cassano from Cursor Research. The blog notes MoK was "designed so agents can adapt it to other platforms."

# Why Open-Source Matters

Cursor is an IDE company. Not a GPU cloud. Not a chip manufacturer. Yet they just published frontier training infrastructure that beats both DeepSeek and NVIDIA's own solutions.

Cursor (MoK)
IDE company publishing training infra
2.37x over DeepEP
Bitwise deterministic
Apache 2.0
DeepSeek (DeepEP)
AI lab publishing training infra
Baseline performance
Non-deterministic
MIT license
THE PATTERN

DeepSeek open-sourced DeepEP and it accelerated MoE research across the industry. Now Cursor ships something 2.37x faster under Apache 2.0. The barrier to training MoE models keeps dropping. 487 stars and 50 forks in the first week - the community is already adapting it.

// Bottom Line

An IDE company just published state-of-the-art MoE training infrastructure that beats both DeepSeek and NVIDIA's own solutions. Mixture-of-Kittens is deterministic, open-source, and already proven at scale. The barrier to training MoE models just dropped significantly. If you have access to NVL72 racks, this is the kernel to use.

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