Speaking as someone who deploys ML models on edge devices - having the MLIR and being able to make binaries for different platforms is terrifically useful! You’re often supporting a range of devices (e.g. video game consoles, phones, embedded, etc) and want to tune the compilation to maximize the performance for your deployment target. And there are a lot of algorithms/models in robotics and animation that simply won’t work with ONNX as they involve computing gradients (which torch cannot export, and the gradients ONNXRuntime give you only work in training sessions, which aren’t as widely). supported.

Also, if you have JAX you can get TF and therefore TFLite. And IREE is part of the OpenXLA project, which Google started.