Doing it the Hard Way: Making the AI engine and language 🔥 of the future — with Chris Lattner of Modular

**Alessio** (0:10)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO and Residents and Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host, Swicks, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (0:19)
Hey, and today we have Chris Lattner in the house. Welcome, Chris.

**Chris Lattner** (0:22)
Hi, both. Thanks for having me.

**Swyx** (0:24)
We're so excited to have you. We have so many questions, and we'll try to get through as many as we can. You're one of the easiest people to research I've ever had on the pod, because you document yourself extensively on non.org/saber.
What's the story behind that just quickly?

**Chris Lattner** (0:39)
I mean, I've had that website for since, I don't know, the mid-90s.
So it's been a very, very, very long time, and I originally had a big personal page. Again, this was the mid-90s with all the scroll tags and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. The anime gifts.

**Swyx** (0:56)
Under construction.

**Chris Lattner** (0:56)
Yeah. Yep. And so it has been rebooted a few times, and web design is not my strong point, but the server was originally named after some fish we had.
That was the origin of Nondot.

**Swyx** (1:08)
Oh, love it. I looked on Tanya's page and she has some spaniels. Yep.

**Chris Lattner** (1:12)
We're dog people. We love many animals.

**Swyx** (1:15)
So your quick bio, you did your PhD in CS in 2005, and then immediately went into Apple working on LLVM, the compiler framework that you created during your PhD. And in our prep, you also maybe had a favorite Scott Forstall story.

**Chris Lattner** (1:32)
Oh, yeah. Well, so I got to work with a lot of really interesting people at Apple.
Scott was actually pretty famous. Scott is responsible for many things across the years, but he really drove the iPhone and he, at least iPhone software specifically. And so Scott was super interesting because he was kind of a high maintenance person. He was very difficult to work with. He did not mind making other people wait for him. So there'd be all these exact reviews of Scott where, you know, the entire room is full of people. He's sitting across the hallway in his office for a half hour making people wait for him, right? And so when Scott was at Apple, I wasn't his biggest fan, I'll admit, but I actually have a lot of respect for a lot of the things he did. He drove a lot of the early iPhone stuff. He made the bet on Siri and a bunch of other stuff that he did. And so he's a very impressive person. I guess he's out of tech these days, but...
Yeah, well, so many of us have iPhones.

**Swyx** (2:25)
My favorite story was the keyboards and how they basically had to invent predictive typing or it wouldn't work.

**Chris Lattner** (2:32)
So much of that, you know, it feels obvious now because it's been developed for years and years and years, but it was like pure research. And nobody knew if you could get all of that software to fit on such a constrained device for 1.0. And so it's just an amazing time.

**Swyx** (2:45)
Incredible. So I'll fill out the bio a little bit. You started working on Clang while at Apple, I think, as a front-end for C and Objective-C.
You created Swift as well in 2010 And then in 2012 won the ACM Software System Award for LLVM, which I think is a crowning accomplishment for a lot of things.

**Chris Lattner** (3:01)
I love to build things.

**Swyx** (3:02)
Yeah, yeah.
You were VP of Autopilot at Tesla, and then Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer at Google for TensorFlow. And then most recently, President of Products and Engineering at RISC-V or Sci-5.

**Chris Lattner** (3:15)
Sci-5, which builds RISC-V. They're the inventors and they drive so much of... RISC-V is a really fancy new instruction set for a lot of computing needs and led to a lot of AI chips.
And it's in so much that exists out there. It was a lot of fun. And so that was actually driving and building hardware.
And so most of my career I spent on the software side of it. And so it was a lot of fun to be able to see the other side of how hardware comes together, how you design it, how you think about it, what are the trade-offs in that entire space. And so for a lot of years I've been just on that hardware-software boundary.

**Swyx** (3:47)
That's a lot of what we're going to talk about today with Modular Mojo.
Well, so that's the brief history and you started Modular in 2022, about 20 years, 20 months ago. What's one other thing on the personal side that people should know about you, that people don't see on the LinkedIn because you're all into hardware-software boundaries and stuff.