Once the most fast-paced part of the LLVM source tree, the MLIR project is slowing down significantly both in the amount and complexity of changes committed. The project had only one open design meeting since the start of this year as opposed to more than a dozen the year before, 1183 commits tagged with “[mlir]” were made to the tree in the first seven months of 2024 as opposed to 2045 during the same period of 2023, etc. At the same time, the increasing amount of work is focused on downstream projects using MLIR, ranging from in-tree CIR to incubated CIRCT and Polygeist, to out-of-tree IREE and XLA, to the proprietary Mojo stack. Are these the signs of MLIR reaching a certain maturity level? Or are these the warning signs of the worrying community disengagement? Should we declare MLIR feature-complete and redirect larger changes to client projects or, on the contrary, actively lift the common parts from downstreams? What is preventing individuals and teams from collaborating more actively in the open? This panel brings together leaders from academia, start-ups and established industry players to discuss their takes on these and other hot questions about MLIR strategy.