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Former Apple lead & Tesla Autopilot head Chris Lattner joining Google Brain to democratize AI

Earlier this year, the creator of the Swift language and head of Xcode developer tools left Apple to join Tesla. However, by June, Chris Lattner departed as lead of the car maker’s self-driving Autopilot software. The longtime Apple employee today revealed that he is now joining the Google Brain research division to work on AI.

Google Brain is the company’s in-house artificial learning team and just one of Alphabet’s various divisions working on machine learning and similar efforts.

As part of Google and Alphabet, the team has resources and access to projects impossible to find elsewhere. Our broad and fundamental research goals allow us to actively collaborate with, and contribute uniquely to, many other teams across Alphabet who deploy our cutting edge technology into products.

In a tweet, Lattner revealed that the focus of his upcoming work will be on making AI “more accessible to everyone.” Specifically, he will be working on TensorFlow (per Bloomberg), Google’s language for machine learing. This job particularly suits him as he was previously head of Apple’s developer tools, and more recently Swift, for over 10 years.

He previously worked on computer vision and machine learning as part of Tesla’s efforts to make self-driving vehicles. However, Lattner left after only six months, revealing that “Tesla isn’t a good fit” for him. At the time, he noted that he was interested in roles “for a seasoned engineering leader.”

Brain is notably more focussed on research and a part of Google’s broader research division. Coincidently, Google Brain announced an initiative back in June with similar goals of studying how people interact with AI in order to improve the user experience.


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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com

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