Chris Lattner, the man who walks around fixing programming languages and compilers, doesn’t spend any time worrying about AGI personally. 

“People worry about what happens when a computer is smarter than us, but at the same time, we are surrounded by other people smarter than us. At least I am,” mused the CEO of Modular casually. 

He believes that we’re a long way away from AI replacing the human capability of the world. “I have major questions about how much compute will take when we power it. From a pure technology level, I don’t think that’s on the cusp,” he remarked about the billions funnelled into building AI models in 2023 alone. 

Lattner suggested that folks worried about this should take a step back and realise we already have super intelligence. “It’s made out of federated groups of humans with shared goals. That’s what I think has been true for hundreds of years, and that’s where progress is made,” he said. 

Speaking of progress, the startup challenging and partnering with NVIDIA, the top supplier of AI chips, recently secured $100 million from Silicon Valley heavyweight General Catalyst. he lean 76-person startup is building its Modular Accelerated Xecution (MAX) platform, which is composed of the MAX Engine, a unified inference library that optimizes and executes AI models from popular AI frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX, across all CPU architectures and NVIDIA GPUs; MAX Serving, which easily deploys those optimized models into any cloud service; and the Mojo programming language, that combines the usability of Python with the performance of C, unlocking unparalleled programmability of AI hardware and extensibility of AI models.

Lattner wants people to be able to express themselves and create things. “I love that somebody doesn’t have to worry about the exact syntax because it is mechanical. That is not the point of coding,” he said. “That’s just something we must do because we need to express ourselves. It gets more and more people involved, making things more accessible. It’s just giving people superpowers,” the software genius added.

Not A Typical AI Company

There’s a clear message on Modular’s website: It focuses on AI because, as Lattner puts it, “that’s where most of the suffering is.” Lattner knows firsthand the struggles of programmers. “It bothers me,” he shares, showing a real understanding of the field.

For him, Modular is about making the complex world of AI more straightforward. He explained, “It is about making it possible for more people to participate in this ecosystem.” He points out that only big players like Google and OpenAI with access to large teams of experts seem to dominate AI right now. The company has large teams of experts. But Lattner believes this approach leaves out many talented people worldwide. His vision for Modular is to change that.

Before launching Mojo through Modular, Lattner has contributed to open-source projects like the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, Clang, and Swift, a programming language used in many Apple products. 

Tech Now and Then

Growing up, Lattner started learning about computers and programming as a kid. Now, at 45, he’s spent decades creating tools to help other programmers build things. Around 2016, when AI was in its early stages, he got interested in the subject. He tried to get folks at Apple to understand why it was necessary. “There were always more important things, and they were not excited about this,” he said. 

“I decided to go on a hero’s journey of understanding how all the technology worked and spent several years at Tesla, Google and other places, learning the fundamentals, over the last 5 to 7 years,” said Lattner, who has led teams at Apple, Tesla, Google and most recently, SiFive.

Looking to 2024, he thinks it takes quite a while for a technology base to build out to the point where the world understands it. Much of the AI out there is demo quality, said Lattner.

“2023 was the year of the language model demo. There wasn’t a tonne of language models impacting products. There were a lot of ChatGPT wrappers, but the impact was pretty low. One of the reasons for that is that technology is problematic. But [generative AI] is disproportionately important, and there’s something real there, “he asserted.  

Lattner predicts that 2024 will be the year of Generative AI getting into products.

Lattner further highlighted that Generative AI is not classical AI running on neural nets. “It’s a neural net embedded into larger applications where new data comes in. Language models have to be tokenized, a lot of this is non-traditional, and the stacks people have been writing on were never designed for that.” 

For his company’s future, Lattner hinted that in the next few quarters, there will be continuous announcements about capabilities, new product features, developer APIs, ecosystem components, and even more things built on top of MAX and Mojo. 

“Right now, we’re very focused on inference; we’ll soon go into training. Training is a major sore point as models get larger; that’s a big deal for the world. We’ll support new hardware to support more of the AI workflow. We try to do everything to the best quality, so one of the things that is true about Modular that annoys some people is that we move slowly,” he admitted.