Slashdot Mirror
Google Hires Former Star Apple Engineer Chris Lattner For Its AI Team (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Chris Lattner, a legend in the world of Apple software, has joined another rival of the iPhone maker: Alphabet's Google, where he will work on artificial intelligence. Lattner announced the news on Twitter on Monday, saying he will start next week. His arrival at Mountain View, California-based Google comes after a brief stint as head of the automated driving program at Tesla, which he left in June. Lattner made a name for himself during a decade-plus career at Apple, where he created the popular programming language Swift. Lattner said he is joining Google Brain, the search giant's research unit. There he will work on a different software language: TensorFlow, Google's system designed to simplify the programming steps for AI, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
...he created the popular programming language Swift.
All he did was run YAJACC - Yet Another JAva Clone Creator.
Geese!
And he was at Tesla and jumped ship? Good Call!
Maybe he is a genius.
AI is right around the corner now. Any day soon it will appear. I promise.
Because you'll be FIRED or CENSORED
This guy jumps ship quite a bit. What's his deal? Can't get along with others on team?
but he flamed out pretty spectacularly at the NBA level.
Did they check his gender and his political views beforehand? I mean, i am ok with any of his opinions/options, but they would skip a lot of sjw drama in the next firing.
So clutch. Go Blue Devils!
Are we also to assume that TensorFlow will be converted to LLVM and Chris will henceforth be known as Christine to help meet Googles diversity quota?
He's not diverse. I wonder how many junior engineers will lose opportunities to balance out his effect on the diversity quotas.
Was it a rifle? 1892? What happened in Kentucky? OMG, Blue Devils? Are they still hiding in Charlottesville VA? Should we bring out the Anti-BD?
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
He is the man behind LLVM. I'm more worried about that.
If you were an AI, you'd understand
Slashdot did an interview with him earlier this year.
One of his responses was:
Before reading that, I had a lot of respect for him. He'd done some great things with LLVM, with Clang, and even with Swift. It's no small feat to build a compiler system that not only competed with GCC, but actually forced GCC to improve itself.
But what he said about Rust was a jolt to me.
I can't see how Rust is "a great language". It's not very intuitive at all, even when you understand its borrow checker and other concepts just fine. Its syntax isn't very impressive. Its standard library is lacking. It has only one implementation, and it's slow and buggy in my experience. Despite being around for some time now, and having a stable release for over 2 years now, we haven't seen anybody do anything really impressive with it. The Rust compiler itself, which is partially written in Rust, depends heavily on LLVM! Servo, which is perhaps the only other notable Rust project, is actually a huge disappointment in my opinion. I've seen very little progress from it so far.
The "community is amazing" statement was particularly strange. In my experience, Rust has one of the worst communities around. It's like they put more focus on social causes than they do on software development. And I think it's really peculiar when a programming language community needs a Code of Conduct to tell them how to interact with one another, and a Moderation Team to police the community. If a programming language community, which we'd expect to be made up of reasonably intelligent and well-educated people, needs a Code of Conduct and a Moderation Team to keep them civilized, then something is seriously wrong with that community. I would not call it "amazing".
I can't see how he can honestly claim what he claimed, and I'm sad to say it made me lose a lot of the respect I had for him and his accomplishments.
While at Duke he hit the game winning shot against Kentucky in the NCAA title game.
What are his views about the anti-diversity policy?
He thinks you're a cocksucker.
Very funny. LLVM and Clang have revolutionized compiler technology. There are very few people in the computer science world with a resume as impressive as Chris Lattner. I'm not too surprised that he didn't thrive at Tesla. They are working too far up the stack. But Google develops low-level compute devices (Tensor processor), programming languages and frameworks, and he'll be a great fit to figure out how to make it all go fast.
Have you got issues with your sexuality? You are not alone: you are on /.
But he is a white male ...
Dude.
Stop.
As long as they're all from Outer Space I don't care.