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Chris Lattner, Poached From Apple To Become Tesla's Top Software Executive, Quits After 6 Months (bizjournals.com)
Tesla said last night Chris Lattner, the vice president of Autopilot software, has left the company about six months after the electric car-maker hired him away from Apple. From a report: Lattner had led the software development team in charge of Autopilot. Tesla executive Jim Keller is now in charge of Autopilot hardware and software. The company announced it had also hired OpenAI research scientist Andrej Karpathy, who will serve as Tesla's new director of artificial intelligence and Tesla Vision. "Chris just wasn't the right fit for Tesla, and we've decided to make a change," the company told reporters in a statement. "We wish him the best." Lattner tweeted last night, "Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all. I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!" Lattner is a widely respected figure in the industry. He is the main author of LLVM as well as Apple's Swift programming language. We interviewed him earlier this year.
He is the main author of LLVM
Way too many co-workers were forced or voluntarily tried the Engineer -> Engineering Leader route and turned out to hate it.
Code, unlike subordinates, does exactly what I tell it to do. If a mechanical design of mine fails it's because I screwed up not because my subordinate did.
"Chris just wasn't the right fit for Tesla, and we've decided to make a change,"
He may have technically quit, but it kinda sounds like he didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. I also find it quite interesting that they talk about 'fit'. I doubt he is a high level asshole, given that post Jobs' Apple is not known for HR scandals, and in my experience personal issues have to be devastatingly bad before a company will let go of someone who knows their stuff. So maybe he didn't know his stuff (which bodes poorly for the Apple car), or he got off side with Musk (which bodes poorly for Tesla).
Anyway, I hope he negotiated one hell of a golden handshake. I don't imagine the Apple car project will be excited about having him back.
If douchebaggery was involved, all bets are off.
Don't you see what's going on here people? Elon is making check knockoffs of people and enslaving the originals and eventually eating their brains! We need to save Chris from the evil clutches of the alien menace that is Elon Musk. WHO'S WITH ME?! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Turns out he got caught fucking the boss's wife!
Nope. The boss doesn't currently have a wife. Maybe it was one of his ex-wives.
I've heard Tesla has a ruthless startup culture even though they're a huge company -- kind of the worst stereotypical SV startup taken to a new level because Elon Musk is so driven. If that's the reason he's out I'm not surprised. Coming from Apple where employees are pretty much pampered and living off the constant money flow from the App Store might be a pretty big shock.
But -- this guy is the "main author of LLVM". I've seen this one play out over and over, and have experienced it personally. Almost every company that isn't producing actual software treats their IT and development resources the same way the rest of the company regarding career path. Every individual worker in non-IT/non-engineering departments dreams of becoming the supervisor, then the manager, then the director and maybe a VP someday...mainly because most people aren't passionate about typical corporate jobs. The problem is that people management skills and engineering/work skills are completely orthogonal. No problem in the other departments -- who would want to be some random report analyst when they could be the boss of a bunch of report analysts and never have to see a report again? This is a bad fit for many engineers, scientists and IT people though, because most of us got into the job because we enjoy it.
Some companies are just starting to come around to the fact that not everyone is hard-wired for management and would rather just be doing more interesting and impactful technical work. That's how I've been able to structure my career (luckily.) When my current company figured out I was good at what I do, liked it and wanted to keep doing work like it, they gave me more responsibility on the technical side instead of a Kindergarten class of employees to manage. I'm hoping I can keep going in this way because I've done the whole department manager thing. I really tried liking it, but it's just not where my skills are best used. Being a senior engineer/architect type, teaching the newbies the ropes and figuring out our long term technical path is what I'm good at, and companies who figure this out with their smarter employees will benefit in the long run IMO.
Well, the guy is known for compilers and languages. He was asked to make autonomous car software. I honestly don't see why anyone would assume because he could do one means he could do the other.
I don't mean to paint with too broad a brush but I've run into a fair number of software developers that are rather arrogant and presume that because they are talented at writing code that they are somehow domain experts in other fields as well. There are more than a few of them who have posted here on slashdot over the years. This doesn't describe the majority I think but it's hardly rare to see the Dunning-Kruger effect among engineers.
Ahem
He should give John Chen a call. Blackberry just got a 900 Million dollar windfall. I'm sure they are looking for good people for software development.
"They have hired people we've fired," Musk said. "We always jokingly call Apple the 'Tesla Graveyard.' If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding."
That's one way to spin it. It smacks a little of post hoc ergo propter hoc though with a little bit of puffery on top. Or it could be simply that they were a bad cultural fit at Tesla and Apple was a better fit. Just because someone doesn't fit at a given company doesn't mean they are inferior. I probably wouldn't be a great fit for Tesla either for a variety of reasons, none of which have anything to do with competence.
Headline says he quit, summary says "they made a change" which is it?
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
That would be false. It was after hiring him that Apple was willing to re license LLVM as GPL to get it integrated into GCC.
The patch I'm working on is GPL licensed and copyright will be assigned to the FSF under the standard Apple copyright assignment.
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/200...
Turns out he got caught fucking the boss's wife!
Nope. The boss doesn't currently have a wife. Maybe it was one of his ex-wives.
I can barely tell them apart. Even his current (or is that recent?) gal Amber Heard fits comfortably into the mold.
Haven't seen someone with such a strong type preference since John Derek (Ursula Andress / Linda Evans / Bo Derek)
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
No, they did not.
>copyright will be assigned to the FSF under the standard Apple copyright assignment
No talk of GPL here, they talked on a limited copyright, not a geniune change of license
after all, how much experience does he have with AI and autopilating software?
Autopilating software? That'll get the kinks out of your AI
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
My quote explicitly mentioned the GPL. Are you illiterate?
Yes, under a limited copyright assignment, _without_ license change
"At the moment it can't even stay in lane properly..." OK in Boston, but might be a drawback elsewhere.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Giving or receiving ?
If they had assigned the copyright to the FSF, then the FSF could have distributed it under any licence they wanted.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The very next sentence after the one you quote says:
[quote]Initially, I intend to link the LLVM libraries in from the existing LLVM distribution, mainly to simplify my work. This code is licensed under a BSD-like license, and LLVM itself will not initially be assigned to the FSF.[/quote]
The patch that was being released under the GPL was the compatibility layer between LLVM and GCC, not LLVM itself.
I don't think LLVM would have gone GPL with or without Apple. The community developing it is happy with it being BSD and the fact that it can easily be incorporated into development tools without technical or licensing hurdles.
Keep shifting the goalposts.
From a long podcast interview he did around the time he left Apple, he has been mostly managing people for a while, along with some technical direction. But it was not like he simply had the title and was doing coding day to day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sure, it might not have but Chris kept talking about doing a full copyright assignment if the community agreed.
If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.
Either way, the point of my post was that Apple's motives for hiring Chris had nothing to do with the ridiculous claims fubarr made. If Apple was all for preventing LLVM from going GPL why would their own employee in an official capacity be talking about a possible assignment of LLVM's copyright to the FSF. The copyright assignment would have allowed the FSF to freely relicense it as they pleased.
To add to my other post.
Maybe that was true initially but Chris kept going on:
If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.
Too young, too simple, sometimes naive.
The thing he was willing to GPL was not the LLVM, but a mere compatibility layer. A thing to keep exploiting GCC, while they make their own backend suck less. The whole text of the proposal sounds like a deal.
The legalese of that limited assignment basically meant that Apple can continue using GCC (because they discovered what a rotten tomato LLVM actually was), while being secure from all aspects of linking to GPL code. Same trick Nvidia did for 15 years with kernel module driver wrapper.
They promised a complete asaignment, but people usually do not hold their promises, especially in business setting.
I'm right, and you are not right.
Don't forget the Clinton Foundation as well.
Are you intentionally lying or just bad at putting across that you're pulling information out of your ass?
From Tesla's site:
"Eight surround cameras provide 360 degrees of visibility around the car at up to 250 meters of range. Twelve updated ultrasonic sensors complement this vision, allowing for detection of both hard and soft objects at nearly twice the distance of the prior system. A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength that is able to see through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead."
That doesn't even make sense. FSF doesn't need copyright assignment to distribute LLVM under the terms of GPL. The BSD-like license allows for that already. They never promised to assign copyright of all of LLVM to the FSF. That wouldn't make sense because it would prevent anyone from distributing it under the less restrictive BSD-like license.
The patch to allow GCC to easily use LLVM as a backend needs to be GPL-licensed because it's a derivative of GCC which is itself GPL-licensed. Assigning copyright on that patch to FSF would have allowed integration into GCC. However, the FSF are opposed to making GCC modular in any way. They think this will be a gateway to integrating GCC with non-free (as in beards) development environments (yes this also makes it hard to integrate into FSF-approved development environments, but that's their choice).
But clang/LLVM has been the best thing for GCC in years. It's provided real competition in the compiler space, and without that GCC was just stagnating and getting buggier. C++ support, error messages, compile speed and plenty of other stuff has improved enormously since clang/LLVM has been on the scene.
And it was his first job out of university. He's now looking for his third job.
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Yes, but the AP2 system doesn't even use all the cameras yet. The radar is just for distance keeping cruise control, the AP doesn't use data from it for steering.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>FSF doesn't need copyright assignment to
>distribute LLVM under the terms of GPL
The whole thread was about the opposite case. LLVM wanted a deeper linking to GCC without having to relicense as GPL. Why you all guys want to derail this thread so much? Working for Apple, or their satellites?
The thing he was willing to GPL was not the LLVM
Initially, yes. But as I quoted he was talking about a full copyright assignment which would have allowed the FSF to relicense it as they please.
They promised a complete asaignment, but people usually do not hold their promises, especially in business setting.
No, he said the LLVM would likely be willing to do a full assignment if the GCC people agreed to a merge.
I'm right, and you are not right.
Are you 2 years old?
Nowhere in Chris' post confirms that they weren't open to GPL licensing LLVM. In fact, it stated the opposite if the FSF had been willing to merge GCC and LLVM. The reason it never happened was the FSF refused not because Apple was against GPLing LLVM.
You're a joke. High on your own immature ego you can't even understand simple things when documented, can't even write properly and have a lot of attitude with nothing to back it up.
Are you under 15?