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Google Hires Chris Lattner, Apple's Former Star Engineer, to 'Democratise AI'

Google Hires Chris Lattner, Apple's Former Star Engineer, to 'Democratise AI'

By Tasneem Akolawala | Updated: 17 August 2017 13:25 IST

Photo Credit: Twitter/Chris Lattner

Highlights

Chris Lattner worked with Apple for over ten years
He is accredited for his work on Swift programming language
Lattner will now work on the Google Brain team

Former star Apple employee Chris Lattner has now joined Google to further its AI efforts. Lattner has worked with Apple for over a decade, and is largely accoladed for his contributions in creating the popular programming language Swift. After working at Tesla for a few months, Lattner has decided to join the Google Brain research team, he revealed.

Lattner announced this new development on Twitter, adding that he will help "democratise AI", making it "more accessible to everyone."

Bloomberg reports that he will work on Google's TensorFlow software language that was designed to simplify the programming steps for artificial intelligence. Lattner left Apple in January this year to join Elon Musk's Tesla and work on the company's autopilot technology. However, six months later, Lattner resigned , saying the company wasn't a "good fit" for him - a statement Tesla echoed.

Now, with Google Brain - the company's research unit - as his new adventure, it will be interesting to see how Lattner elevates TensorFlow. He worked with Apple to create Swift, a programming language that has been appreciated widely as modern and accessible to all programmers - be the novice or experienced.

Google can be expected use Lattner's expertise to eventually rely less on hardware for AI, and make it more user-friendly on phones and other gadgets alike. With AI fast becoming the new trend in smartphones, Lattner's contribution would be worthy for Google.

Google's AI efforts have ramped up significantly in the recent past, with a recent report claiming that the tech giant and MIT research have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can automatically retouch images like a professional photographer in real time, eliminating the need to edit images after they are clicked with smartphones.

Furthermore, Google's new AI assistant - Google Assistant is now at the heart of almost all Google-owned products and is also being adopted by third-party developers at a rapid pace, so much so that it is now supported on over a 100 million devices.

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