Chris Lattner, a former star Apple engineer who built early versions of Apple’s Swift programming language in 2010 before a team was formed to further the project, has joined Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) team, according to his announcement on Twitter on Monday.
He said he would start next week at Google Brain, the search giant’s research unit.
Bloomberg reported today that Lattner will be working in some capacity on TensorFlow, Google’s system designed to simplify the programming steps for AI.
Google released TensorFlow for free last year.
I'm super excited to join Google Brain next week: AI can't democratize itself (yet?) so I'll help make it more accessible to everyone!
— Chris Lattner (@clattner_llvm) August 14, 2017
In May, the search company unveiled a specialized chip designed for TensorFlow, called TPU, that it rents through its cloud-computing service.
Lattner left Apple in January to join Tesla because the opportunity to head the Tesla Autopilot team as a Vice President was “irresistible.” He only lasted six months there, having left the electric car maker in June.
“Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla,” the car maker said at the time.
“In the end, Elon and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I did,” Lattner wrote in an update to his resume.