[Youssef MENJOUR]

A Graphical Language for a Complex World

For readers discovering Graiphic for the first time, everything starts with LabVIEW. LabVIEW is a graphical programming language built on dataflow, where systems are drawn rather than written. Instead of lines of text, engineers wire logic, computation, and hardware together visually.

This choice is deliberate. We believe complex systems are better understood when they can be seen. In a world where AI, hardware, and software are increasingly intertwined, visibility becomes a strategic advantage. LabVIEW is our canvas, our cockpit, and the foundation on which we decided to build something bigger.

2025: A Difficult Year, and a Necessary One

2025 was paradoxical. Financially, it was one of the most difficult years Graiphic has faced. Every decision mattered, every delay hurt, and every mistake was felt immediately.

And yet, paradoxically, it was also our most innovative year so far. In January 2025, we delivered the first stable production release of SOTA, our software distribution platform for toolkits, tools, models, examples, licensing systems, and drivers.

It worked. And then it broke. A lot.

By the time this post is written, SOTA has reached its 162nd version. This means we shipped, on average, a new release every two days throughout 2025. It was intense, exhausting, and sometimes brutal, but it was necessary. You do not build a foundation by polishing the roof. You dig. You hit rocks. And you keep digging.

Reinventing Distribution, Not for Fun but for Survival

SOTA was not built for the pleasure of building another platform. It was born from a very concrete problem: how do you distribute advanced AI toolkits in LabVIEW in a modern, reliable, and scalable way.

Existing solutions in the LabVIEW ecosystem such as VIPM or the NI Package Manager are solid and historical, but they were not designed for fast-evolving AI workflows. Our ambition is to catch up with them, and then go further.

We took inspiration from modern ecosystems like Steam in the video game industry and Adobe Creative Cloud in the graphics world. SOTA is our answer: a living ecosystem, continuously updated, where software is not frozen but evolving, delivering gain, clarity, economy of effort, and long-term stability.

Building an AI Ecosystem, Not Just a Toolkit

The real reason SOTA exists is ambition. In 2025, we released the LabVIEW Deep Learning Toolkit, designed to cover the full AI lifecycle directly inside LabVIEW.

Writing models, editing graphs, training, optimizing, and executing models efficiently is now possible in a single graphical environment. Execution is optimized across CUDA, TensorRT, DirectML, oneDNN, and OpenVINO.

We deliberately chose ONNX as an open, universal, and interoperable format to guarantee compatibility with today’s active ecosystems. ONNX is our contract. LabVIEW is our language. ONNX Runtime is our engine.

From Execution to Orchestration: Inventing GO

To go further, we deeply committed to the ONNX Runtime open-source project. Our objective was clear: bring training and orchestration natively into ONNX graphs.

This led to the introduction of GO, Graph Orchestration. By combining LabVIEW, ONNX, and ONNX Runtime, Graiphic introduced a unique concept: a single graph capable of expressing inference, training, logic, and execution flow.

One artifact. One runtime. One source of truth.

Completing the Vision with Computer Vision and Acceleration

Deep learning alone is not enough. In parallel, we developed a Computer Vision Toolkit covering image acquisition, preprocessing, annotation, and integration with learning pipelines.

At NI Connect 2025 in Fort Worth, discussions with NI engineers revealed something essential: acceleration should not be limited to deep learning.

In August, we released the LabVIEW Accelerator Toolkit, a general-purpose graph computing toolkit mirroring the LabVIEW palette and enabling GPU acceleration through simple diagram reuse. ONNX stopped being “just AI” and became a general graph execution engine.

Local Generative AI, by Design

2025 also marked the release of our GenAI Toolkit, enabling local execution of LLMs, VLMs, and SLMs directly inside LabVIEW.

No cloud dependency. No hidden pipelines. Privacy, determinism, and performance are guaranteed by design. This opens the door to intelligent agents natively integrated into LabVIEW architectures.

2026: From Power to Accessibility

With the industrial foundation laid in 2025, 2026 will be the year of accessibility, refinement, and business.

Our roadmap focuses on simplification. We will introduce a new generation of Express VI Assistants across all toolkits to guide users through model execution, graph orchestration, and image processing. The objective is simple: reduce friction, increase confidence, and guarantee results.

From Data to Model, Seamlessly

One of the key releases of 2026 will be a new Annotation Tool, designed to take any image dataset, annotate it efficiently, train a model, and deploy it end to end inside a single LabVIEW pipeline.

A complete solution delivering measurable gain, cost reduction, and time economy.

Hardware Becomes Part of the Graph

2026 is also the year Graiphic enters hardware. We will design a first generation of intelligent, reprogrammable DAQ hardware combining FPGA and GPU on custom boards.

Software updates will redefine hardware behavior. The ecosystem grows. Hardware becomes a first-class graph node.

Beyond the LabVIEW Runtime

We will also open the path toward a new runtime, complementary and potentially alternative to the LabVIEW runtime, enabling deployment on NVIDIA Jetson and DGX platforms with the same simplicity and guarantees.

The graph remains the contract.

Learning Systems That Interact with the World

Reinforcement learning coverage will expand with new examples and environments available through SOTA. Graiphic will begin developing its own simulation environments by late 2026 or early 2027.

Ambition, with a Smile and Short Nights

Every new feature costs us a bit of life expectancy. Sometimes the team sleeps at the office. That is how we managed, in 2025, to demonstrate autonomous driving of an F1 car in the Formula G environment at NI Connect.

We push hard because ambition demands it.

A Different Economic Model

Paradoxically, we are seriously exploring making the entire Graiphic ecosystem free to use, with a licensing model inspired by Unreal Engine.

You use it. You build with it. And only if you generate revenue thanks to it do we take a fee. Fair. Aligned. Sustainable.

Looking Forward

Our vision is clear: make LabVIEW the language of AI.

A language to design, edit, integrate, and deploy intelligent systems on any hardware, efficiently and visually.

2026 will bring better documentation, stronger communication, richer GitHub content, guaranteed results, and a few surprises. We will be where you do not expect us.

The graph is only getting bigger.

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