[freyir]

His experience seems to be entirely focused on compilers. He's a talented engineer and leader, and his decision to join Google Brain indicates interest in AI, but wouldn't the chief AI/ML engineer have some demonstrable expertise in that particular field?

[saagarjha]

Chris Lattner works on Swift for TensorFlow, so it’s not hard to see why he was picked for this role.

[freyir]

That might be credited more to his role in creating Swift than his expertise in ML.

To be clear, I'm not claiming he's not capable of the role at some point. I don't know one way or the other. But his transition from compilers to AI seems fairly recent.

[julien_c]

Jeff Dean didn't have a demonstrable expertise in AI before heading Google AI.

[iainmerrick]

Yes he did -- He co-authored an influential deep learning paper in 2012: https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub40565

I think his contribution at that time was mainly clever ways to drastically scale up existing neural net techniques, but just scaling things up 100x or 1000x seems to be a large part of the magic of deep learning.

[polishTar]

And not only that. Even his undergrad thesis back from 1990 was on neural nets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I1fs4sczbCaACzA9XwxR3DiuXVt...

[justicezyx]

Jeff cofounded the google brain team.

And TBH, it was him, who knows general computing from circuits to planet scale distributed systems, really enabled the AI as it today, at least inside Google.