he's clearly trying to avoid what happened to Swift

Also to MLIR while Lattner was at Google:

MLIR was born—a modular, extensible compiler infrastructure designed to bring order to the chaos. It brought forth a foundation that could scale across hardware platforms, software frameworks, and the rapidly evolving needs of machine learning. It aimed to unify these systems, and provide a technology platform that could harmonize compute from many different hardware makers.

But unification is hard. What started as a technical project quickly turned into a battleground: open-source governance, corporate rivalries, and competing visions all collided. What could have been a straightforward engineering win became something much more complicated.

https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-8...