If you train or serve models, you depend on MLIR whether or not you have ever written a line of it. XLA lowers through it, Triton is built on it, Mojo is MLIR-native, and Torch-MLIR, IREE, and ONNX-MLIR exist to funnel their respective frontends into it. The reason a single piece of infrastructure ended up underneath so many otherwise-competing stacks is worth understanding, because it explains a lot about how modern ML compilers are actually built, and where their seams are.