Why We Built AIMA: An Open-Source Project for Managing AI Inference with AI

Constantly Installing Models for Others Since the beginning of 2025, numerous hardware vendors and clients have approached us, expressing interest in our model management platform. The reasons are straightforward: the interface is user-friendly, model-centric, and allows users to get started with a single click—low barrier to entry. Some clients were even willing to pay us to deploy a similar setup for them. However, that platform was originally designed for specific hardware. NVIDIA GPUs, Huawei Ascend, Hygon DCU, AMD ROCm—each has different drivers, device mounting mechanisms, environment variables, and security contexts. Adapting to each new hardware type required writing massive amounts of code, which was painful. What hurt more was the aftermath. Clients would come to us regularly: help us adapt the latest model, help us upgrade the engine. Regardless of how much the platform sold for, it ultimately required continuous manual investment to maintain. I started wondering: why do peo