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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#101

Post by versteegen »

fchollet wrote: post #77
trott wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats, François, and good luck! Q: The ARC Prize blog mentions that you plan to make ARC harder for machines and easier for humans. I'm curious if it will be adapted to resist scaling the training dataset (Like what BARC did -- see my other comment here)? As it stands today, I feel like the easiest approach to solving it would be BARC x10 or so, rather than algorithmic inventions.

Right, one rather uninteresting line of approaches to ARC consists of trying to anticipate what might be in the test set, by generating millions of synthetic tasks. This can only work on relatively simple tasks, since the chance of task collision (between the test set and what you generate) is very low for any sophisticated task. ARC 2 will improve on ARC 1 by making tasks less brute-forceable (both in the sense of m…

Hi! As someone who spent the last month pouring myself into the ARC challenge (which has been lots of fun, thanks so much for creating it), I'm happy to see it made harder, but please make it harder by requiring more reasoning, not by requiring more human-like visual perception! ARC is almost perfect as a benchmark for analogical reasoning, except for the need for lots of image processing as well. [Edit: however, I've realised that perception is representation, so requiring it is a good thing.]

Any plan for more validation data to match the new harder testset?

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#102

Post by dbspin »

Barrin92 wrote: post #95
openrisk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country. It must be saying something profound about the human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.

Bureaucracy as per Weber is simply 'rationally organized action'. It dominates because this is the appropriate way to manage hundreds of thousands of people in a impersonal, rule based and meritocratic way. Third world countries work the other way around, they don't have professional bureaucracies, they only have clans and families. It's not ossified but efficient. If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employe…

Bureaucracies are certainly impersonal, but you'd be at a loss to find one that's genuinely rule based and meritocratic. To the extent that they become remain rule based they are no longer effective and get routed around. To the extent that they're meritocratic, the same thing happens with networks of influence. Once you get high enough, or decentralised enough bureaucracies work like any other human tribes. Bureaucracies may sometimes be effective ways to cut down on nepotism (although they manifestly fail at that in my country), but they're machines for manifesting cronyism.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#103

Post by cool-RR »

openrisk wrote: post #73
fchollet wrote: post #66

Hi HN, Francois here. Happy to answer any questions! Here's a start -- "Did you get poached by Anthropic/etc": No, I am starting a new company with a friend. We will announce more about it in due time! "Who uses Keras in production": Off the top of my head the current list includes Midjourney, YouTube, Waymo, Google across many products (even Ads started moving to Keras recently!), Netflix, Spotify, Snap, GrubHub, Sq…

> I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country. It must be saying something profound about the human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.

> > I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision

> omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country.

No, it sounds like how most successful organizations work.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#104

Post by yazaddaruvala »

agos wrote: post #96
Barrin92 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bureaucracy as per Weber is simply 'rationally organized action'. It dominates because this is the appropriate way to manage hundreds of thousands of people in a impersonal, rule based and meritocratic way. Third world countries work the other way around, they don't have professional bureaucracies, they only have clans and families. It's not ossified but efficient. If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employe…

effective, maybe. efficient... I would not be so sure.

Depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Small organizations define efficiency based on time to make number go up/down. Meanwhile, if something bad happens at 2am and no one wakes up - whatever there we’re likely no customers impacted.

Larger organizations are really efficient at ensuring the p10 (ie worst) hires are not able to cause any real damage. Every other thing about the org is set up to most cost effectively ensure least damage. Meanwhile, numbers should also go up is a secondary priority.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#105

Post by openrisk »

Barrin92 wrote: post #95
openrisk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country. It must be saying something profound about the human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.

Bureaucracy as per Weber is simply 'rationally organized action'. It dominates because this is the appropriate way to manage hundreds of thousands of people in a impersonal, rule based and meritocratic way. Third world countries work the other way around, they don't have professional bureaucracies, they only have clans and families. It's not ossified but efficient. If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employe…

> It's not ossified but efficient.

These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what?

> If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employees

Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy?

And given an organization's size, what determines the height of its "pyramid"?

The fact that management consultancies are making (in perpetuity) a plush living by helping reduce "middle management layers" tells you explicitly that the beast has a life of its own.

Empire building and vicious internal politics that are disconnected from any sense of "efficiency" are pretty much part of "professional bureaucracies" - just as they are of the public sector ones. And whether we are clients, users or citizens we pay the price.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#106

Post by yazaddaruvala »

lrpahg wrote: post #82
satyanash wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Why did you decide to merge Keras into TensorFlow in 2019": I didn't! The decision was made in 2018 by the TF leads -- I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision. The TF team was huge at the time, 50+ people, while Keras was just me and the open-source community. In retrospect I think Keras would have been better off as an independent multi-backend framework -- but that would have required me quitting G…

> How are these levels determined? I have no knowledge of Google, but if L5 is the highest IC rank, then L8 will often be obtained through politics and playing the popularity game. The U.S. corporate system is set up to humiliate and exploit real contributors. The demeaning term "IC" is a reflection of that. It is also applied when someone literally writes a whole application and the idle corporate masters stand by a…

The IC ladder at Google grows from L3 up to L10.

An L8 IC has similar responsibilities as a Director (roughly 100ish people) but rather than people, and priority responsibility it is systems, architecture, reliability responsibility.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#107

Post by Cthulhu_ »

openrisk wrote: post #73
fchollet wrote: post #66

Hi HN, Francois here. Happy to answer any questions! Here's a start -- "Did you get poached by Anthropic/etc": No, I am starting a new company with a friend. We will announce more about it in due time! "Who uses Keras in production": Off the top of my head the current list includes Midjourney, YouTube, Waymo, Google across many products (even Ads started moving to Keras recently!), Netflix, Spotify, Snap, GrubHub, Sq…

> I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country. It must be saying something profound about the human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.

I personally can't relate, but that's because I've never been in any organization at that scale, biggest companies I've been had employees numbering in the thousands, of which IT was only hundreds at most. There you go as far as having scrum teams with developers, alongside that one or more architect, and "above" that a CTO. Conversely, companies like Google have tens of thousands of people in IT alone.

But likewise, since we're fans of equality in my country, there's no emphasis on career ladders / progression; you're a developer, maybe a lead developer or architect, and then you get to management, with the only distinguishing factor being your years of experience, length of your CV, and pay grade. Pay grade is "simply" bumped up every year based on performance of both you personally and the company as a whole.

But that's n=1 experience, our own company is moving towards a career ladder system now as well. Not nearly as extensive as the big companies' though.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#108

Post by anilgulecha »

lrpahg wrote: post #82
satyanash wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Why did you decide to merge Keras into TensorFlow in 2019": I didn't! The decision was made in 2018 by the TF leads -- I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision. The TF team was huge at the time, 50+ people, while Keras was just me and the open-source community. In retrospect I think Keras would have been better off as an independent multi-backend framework -- but that would have required me quitting G…

> How are these levels determined? I have no knowledge of Google, but if L5 is the highest IC rank, then L8 will often be obtained through politics and playing the popularity game. The U.S. corporate system is set up to humiliate and exploit real contributors. The demeaning term "IC" is a reflection of that. It is also applied when someone literally writes a whole application and the idle corporate masters stand by a…

L5 isn't the highest IC level at Google. Broadly would go up to L10, but the ratio at every level is ~1:4 or 1:5 b/w IC levels.

The L7/L8 level engineers I've spoken or worked with have definitely earned it - they bring to bear significant large scale systems knowledge and bring it to bear on very large problem statements. Impact would be felt on billion$ impact wise.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#109

Post by openrisk »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #97
openrisk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country. It must be saying something profound about the human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.

what does this comment even mean? how does an L8 telling an L5 to do something a reflection of a "gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country."? i can't figure out the salience of any of the 3 adjectives (nor third world). > human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape. ...how else do you propose to dominate a landscap…

well others seems to be getting the meaning (whether they agree or not is another matter), so you might be too habituated to the "L" world to bother understanding?

> if this comment weren't so short i'd swear it was written by chatgpt.

ditto

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#110

Post by cowsaymoo »

fchollet wrote: post #66

Hi HN, Francois here. Happy to answer any questions! Here's a start -- "Did you get poached by Anthropic/etc": No, I am starting a new company with a friend. We will announce more about it in due time! "Who uses Keras in production": Off the top of my head the current list includes Midjourney, YouTube, Waymo, Google across many products (even Ads started moving to Keras recently!), Netflix, Spotify, Snap, GrubHub, Sq…

I’m really going through it, trying to get legacy Theano and TensorFlow 1.x models from 2016 running on modern GPUs due to compatibility headaches due to OS, NVIDIA CUDA, CuDNN, drivers, docker, python, and package/image hubs all contributing their own roadblocks to actually coding. Ideally we would abandon this code, but we kind of need it running if we want to thoroughly understand our new model's performance on unseen old data, and/or understand Kappa scores between models. Will the move towards freeing Keras from TF again potentially reintroduce version chaos, or will it future proof it from that? Do you see a potential for something like this to once again befall tomorrow's legacy code relying on TF 1.x and 2.x?
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