Tesla Poaches Apple’s Chris Lattner, Creator Of Swift, For New VP Of Autopilot Software Role

January 11, 20177 years ago James Ayre 0 Comments

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Tesla has poached an 11-year veteran of Apple, Chris Lattner, and installed him as the new vice president of Autopilot software, according to a post last night on Tesla’s blog. Lattner is, notably, the mind behind Apple’s “newest” programming language, Swift.

The timing of this is interesting, as Apple only just announced Lattner’s departure today (January 10th). I’d be curious to know how long the two have been talking/negotiating.

What’s also notable is that Lattner worked for Apple for so long (11 years), but Tesla was able to steal him away anyway. Maybe he wanted a new challenge? (Or maybe he thinks that Apple is now on the decline and Tesla on the rise? This is pure speculation on my part of course.)

Here’s more from Tesla regarding who has been holding down the fort while waiting for Lattner to come on board: “As Chris joins Tesla, we would like to give a special thanks to Jinnah Hosein, SpaceX’s Vice President of Software, who has been serving a dual role as the interim Vice President of Tesla Autopilot Software and will now be heading back to SpaceX full-time. We would like to thank Jinnah for the efforts needed to achieve excellence in both roles, David Nister, our Vice President of Autopilot Vision, and the team for their exceptional work in advancing Autopilot.”

Elon provided a short addendum on Twitter:

Tesla's approach to building an autonomy platform is focused on high compute efficiency machine learning. Primarily vision w radar & sonar.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2017

Tech Crunch provides more context on Lattner: “Lattner’s history includes creating the Clang compiler and designing the LLVM compiler optimization infrastructure. He was also a key contributor to the evolution of Objective C and worked on Apple’s Xcode software development tool during his time at the iPhone maker. He also apparently builds beautiful raw-edge wood furniture.”

On a related note, Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently announced via Twitter that the company could begin rolling out the software update enabling Autopilot functionality in HW2 vehicles within the next week.

If all looks good, HW2 Autopilot functionality will switch from shadow to active mode by end of week for cars beyond initial 1000

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 8, 2017