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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

developers.googleblog.com

111–120 of 182 posts

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#111

His tweets are quite interesting. E.g. https://x.com/fchollet/status/1638057646602489856 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1840486105118015901 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1845103528806662258

Very insightful to have a number from him here:

> LLMs are trained on much more than the whole Internet -- they also consume handcrafted answers produced by armies of highly qualified data annotators (often domain experts). Today approximately 20,000 people are employed full-time to produce training data for LLMs.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#112

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…

From one François to an other, thank you for you work, and all the best with your next endeavor!

Your various tutorials and your book "Deep Learning with Python" have been invaluable in helping me get up to speed in applied deep learning and in learning the ropes of a field I knew nothing about.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#113

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.

> > 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.

Most large organizations are hugely bureucratic regardless of whether they are successful or not :-)

In any case the prompt for the thread is somebody mentioning their (subjective) view that the deep hiearachy they were operating under, made a "wrong call".

We'll never know if this true or not, but it points to the challenges for this type of organizational structure faces. Dynamics in remote layers floating somewhere "above your level" decide the fate of things. Aspects that may have little to do with any meritocracy, reasonableness, fairness etc. become the deciding factors...

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#114

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…

Hi Francois,

any chance to work or at least intern (remote, unpaid) with you directly? Would be super interesting and enriching.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#115

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…

[deleted]

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#116
post #61

Strange. Had never read blog posts about individual engineers leaving Google on official Google Developers Blog before. Is this a first? Every day someone prominent leaves Google... Sounds like a big self-own if Google starts to post this kind of stuff. Looks like sole post by either of the (both new to Google) authors in the byline.

Same, what point does the post serve? And it's not like Keras is the hottest thing in DL world.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#117

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 un…

Keras is now standalone and multi-backend again. Keras weights files from older versions are still loadable and Keras code from older versions are still runnable (on any backend as long as they only used Keras APIs)!

In general the ability to move across backends makes your code much longer-lived: you can take your Keras models with you (on a new backend) after something like TF or PyTorch stops development. Also, it reduces version compatibility issues, since tf.keras 2.n could only work with TF 2.n, but each Keras 3 version can work with a wide range of older and newer TF versions.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#118

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…

> 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…

>These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what?

Compared to numerous small companies of the aggregate same size. It's not just an assertion, Google (and other big companies) produces incredibly high rates of value per employee and goods at extremely low costs to consumers.

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

Coase told us the answer to this[1]. Organizations are going to be as large as they can possibly be until the internal cost of organization is larger than the external costs of transaction with other organizations. How large that is depends on the tools available to organize and the quality of organization, but tends larger over time because management techniques and information sharing tools become more sophisticated.

The reason why large organizations are efficient is obvious if you turn it on its head. If we were all single individual organizations billing each other invoices we'd have maximum transaction costs and overhead. Bureaucracy and hierarchies minimize this overhead by turning it into a dedicated disciplines and rationalize that process. A city of 5 million people, centrally administered produces more economic value than a thousand villages with the same aggregate population.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937...

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#119
post #116
post #61

Strange. Had never read blog posts about individual engineers leaving Google on official Google Developers Blog before. Is this a first? Every day someone prominent leaves Google... Sounds like a big self-own if Google starts to post this kind of stuff. Looks like sole post by either of the (both new to Google) authors in the byline.

Same, what point does the post serve? And it's not like Keras is the hottest thing in DL world.

Even if it were, the article is written like a farewell email the employee sends to their group, not from Keras standpoint. I bet a couple rando VPs are writing self-promotional material to increase their visibility and they had nothing better to publish. Both are only 1yr in there. Google needs a DOGE (Department of Google Efficiency).

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#120

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…

Hey,I really liked your little book of deep learning, even though I didn't understand everything in it yet. Thanks for writing it!

Er, isn't that by François Fleuret, not by François Chollet?
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