Chris Lattner, the engineer credited with creating Swift, Apple's super-popular programming language, has landed at Google, he announced Monday on Twitter.
Lattner will be working on Google Brain, Google's major artificial intelligence project.
Lattner's career has been the subject of much interest and some controversy in the past year. At Apple, he was the lead caretaker of Swift, one of the company's most successful software projects ever. That's why it was a surprise when he announced in January he was leaving Apple for Tesla, even though Tesla is known for poaching Apple engineers.
At Tesla, Lattner led the company's troubled Autopilot program. Latter loved the job and the work but he and Tesla CEO Elon Musk didn't get along, a person with knowledge of the matter told Business Insider. After months of butting heads — and only around six months on the job — he left the company in a decision that was "mutual," this person said.
All this means that Lattner is going to Google with an armload of qualifications and a fan base that could help the search giant snare even more big talent for its AI efforts.
Google is betting big on AI tech like the Brain. Like the rest of the tech industry, Google believes that AI and its cousin, machine learning, will drive the tech industry's future. It sees its highly regarded AI technology as its ace-in-the-hole for its young-but-growing cloud computing division. Google hopes its AI technology will eventually help it best Amazon Web Service, its big rival in the business.
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