Dr. Chris Lattner
Modular
Co-founder and CEO of Modular, creator of LLVM, Clang, MLIR, Swift, and Mojo. Former Director of the TensorFlow Infrastructure team at Google Brain, VP of Autopilot Software at Tesla, and Senior Director at Apple. Revolutionized compiler infrastructure for AI hardware acceleration.
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
The Mojo Programming Language for AI Hardware Kernel Development
Designed and built Mojo, a high-performance language that combines Python syntax and developer ergonomics with systems programming primitives, SIMD vectorization, and hardware-accelerated memory ownership.
Ecosystem packages and third-party library bindings are actively expanding relative to decades-old C++/CUDA tooling.
Context: Modular MAX Engine, Mojo compiler, heterogenous CPU/GPU execution pipelines.
View missionMLIR: Multi-Level Intermediate Representation for Heterogeneous AI Accelerators
Co-authored the landmark paper establishing MLIR, a unified compiler framework that bridges high-level machine learning graphs with diverse hardware accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, custom ASICs) through extensible dialects.
Dialect conversions require rigorous domain-specific lowering pipelines for novel specialized silicon.
Context: C++ compiler framework, LLVM backend, dialect ecosystem (Linalg, Affine, Vector, GPU).
View mission