I was in class last week. One of my students raised their hand mid-lecture and asked something that stopped me for a second.

"Why is every AI tool built on Python? C++ is faster. Rust is faster. Even Java is faster. So why Python?"

Honestly it’s a fair question. And the answer reveals something really interesting about how the AI industry actually works.
Let me explain this properly. 🧵 First, let's be honest about what Python actually is.

Python is slow. Not a little slow.

Genuinely, measurably slow compared to C, C++ or Rust when you are doing raw computation.

If you wrote a matrix multiplication function in pure Python and ran it against the same function in C++, C++ would finish and go make tea before Python was halfway done.

So on paper, the student's question makes complete sense. Why would you build the most computationally expensive technology humanity has ever created on one of the slowest languages available?

The answer is that Python is not actually doing the heavy work.