My understanding is that IR is designed as though there were a VM to run it, but in practice, IR is immediately used to generate code for a target architecture.
That might have been true originally, but I don't think anyone uses LLVM like a JVM/CLR-esque VM any more. As the parent states, the original Low-Level Virtual Machine initialism was even retracted, meaning the project's name is just the "arbitrary" sequence of letters LLVM, with no particular meaning assigned to them.
