Swift Creator Chris Lattner Is Now Joining Google’s AI Team

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Ex-Apple engineer Chris Lattner, who developed the Swift programming language for the company, left the iPhone maker in January to work with Tesla on its Autopilot technology. However, after spending a few months with the electric car maker, Lattner has now joined Google. In a tweet, the star engineer said he will help the search giant develop its AI with the aim of making it accessible for all.

Chris Lattner is a good hire by Google

Lattner didn’t specify what exactly he will be working on, but he tweeted, “AI can’t democratize itself (yet?) so I’ll help make it more accessible to everyone!”

According to Bloomberg, Lattner has been hired to work on the Tensorflow language, which Google uses to simplify AI programming.

Chris Lattner was the founder and chief architect of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure open source project. Apple hired him after that in 2005. After serving Apple for more than a decade, Lattner joined Tesla in January, and his stint at Tesla ended in just six months.

He specified the reason for his exit on his updated resume: “In the end, Elon and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I did.”

After leaving Tesla, Lattner tweeted that he was seeking companies interested in a “seasoned engineering leader.” Google has a lot to gain by hiring him. The Swift programming language was not just fast and modern, but it was also accessible to all, including seasoned programmers and first timers.

Whatever experience Lattner gained from working with Apple and Tesla will help him make TensorFlow much easier to use. Google can also use Lattner’s expertise to reduce hardware demands to ensure the smooth running of AI on devices like phones and computers, notes Engadget.

Google bets big on AI

TensorFlow, which was released by Google last year for free, is helping the company greatly in its endeavors to spread AI and make money from it. In May 2016, the search giant introduced TPU, a specialized chipset that caters to the software that the company rents through its cloud computing service, notes Bloomberg

Google is betting big on AI tech with its key artificial intelligence project dubbed Brain, and not only Google but all major players in the tech industry believe that the future of the tech industry will be determined by AI and machine learning. Google believes that AI tech will help it take its cloud computing division to great heights and even beat its biggest rival, Amazon Web Services.

Several machine learning and computer science experts work for Brain. Prominent members of Brain include Jeff Dean and Geoffrey Hinton; the former was a pioneer in neural networking, while the latter created MapReduce. Researchers at Brain have the freedom to choose their areas of interest from options which include health care, natural language understanding, art generation, and robotics, all through machine learning, notes VentureBeat.

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