[jlokier]

Just based on their website, I think selling Mojo as a faster Python-like language isn't intended to be their main product. They place a lot more emphasis on AI/ML acceleration than on Mojo, and on creating compatibility between different AI hardware acceleration systems.

I have the impression they hope vendors of AI acceleration hardware, clusters and cloud services will be their customers, to provide uniform and heavily backward-compatible cross-acclerator AI/ML APIs to those vendors' customers.

And hope that users of those services and hardware will also pay for high quality well-researched APIs that work reliably with many different AI/ML accelerators, even if Mojo is free. Similar to how RedHat provides value through commercial-grade QA and sustained development for Linux on high-end hardware, that would be complicated and risky to use otherwise.