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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#121

Post by openrisk »

Barrin92 wrote: post #118
openrisk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ec…

Economic arguments almost always apply strictly to idealized worlds where each individual calculates the pennies for each action etc. The degree to which such deductions apply to the real world varies. In this case large bureaucracies are everywhere in the public sector as well, where, at least to first order, price mechanisms, profit maximization etc. are not the driving force. Hierarchy of some form is innate to human organization, this is not the point.

The alternative to a large organization with a sky-high hierarchy is not an inefficient solopreneur but a smaller organization with (possibly) a flater hierarchy. Even strictly within the Coase logic the "external cost" can be artificially low (non-priced externalities [1]), ranging from the mental health of employees, to the impact of oligopolistic markets on society's welfare etc. This creates an unusually generous buffer for "internal costs".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#122

Post by mFixman »

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

Kudos to Google for hiring extremely competent people, but I'm surprised that the creator and main architect of Keras hadn't been promoted to Staff Engineer at minimum.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#123

Post by raverbashing »

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…

Thanks for that, and thanks for Keras

Another happy Keras user here (under TF - but even before with Theano)

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#124

Post by xyst »

mFixman wrote: post #122
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 Kudos to Google for hiring extremely competent people, but I'm surprised that the creator and main architect of Keras hadn't been promoted to Staff Engineer at minimum.

at certain levels in the corporate ladder, it's all about who or whom you glaze to get to that next level.

actual hard skills are irrelevant

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#125

Post by xyst »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #44
geor9e wrote: post #19

If I were to speculate, I would guess he quit Google. 2 days ago, his $1+ million Artificial General Intelligence competition ended. Chollet is now judging the submissions and will announce the winners in a few weeks. The timing there can't be a coincidence.

Google, in my experience, is a place where smart people go to retire. I have many brilliant friends who work there, but all of them have essentially stopped producing interesting work since the day they started. They all seem happy and comfortable, but not ambitious. I'm sure the pay is great, but it's not a place for smart people who are interested in doing something . I've followed Francois (and had the chance to c…

you can say this about any Fortune 500 corporation, to be honest

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#126

Post by ak_111 »

hiddencost wrote: post #62
zxexz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I think $100M is totally enough to train a SotA "foundation model". It's all in the use case. I'd love to hear explicit arguments against this.

There's a bunch of failed AI companies who raised been $100M and $200M with the goal of training foundation models. What they discovered is that they were rapidly out paced by the large players, and didn't have any way to generate revenue. You're right that it's enough to train one, but IMO you're wrong that it's enough to build a company around.

can you please name names? I can't think of any (but am not an expert on the space).

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#127

Post by ak_111 »

kristopolous wrote: post #58
crystal_revenge wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, in my experience, is a place where smart people go to retire. I have many brilliant friends who work there, but all of them have essentially stopped producing interesting work since the day they started. They all seem happy and comfortable, but not ambitious. I'm sure the pay is great, but it's not a place for smart people who are interested in doing something . I've followed Francois (and had the chance to c…

Am I almost alone in having no interest working for a large firm like Google? I've been in tech since the 90s. The only reason I'd go is to network and build a team to do a mass exodus with and that's literally it. I don't actually care about working on a product I have exactly zero executive control over.

tbh working at google has a lot of advantages that a lot of hackers don't appreciate until they start trying to doing their own thing.

For one thing as soon as you start doing your own thing you will quickly find your day eaten up by a trillion of small little admin (filling reports, chasing clients for payments, setting up a business address) things that you didn't know even exist. And that is not even taking into consideration the buisness development side of thing (going to marketing/sales meeting, arranging calls, finding product/market fit!, recruiting, setting up payroll....) At google you can have a career where 90% of the time you are basically just hacking.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#128

Post by cynicalpeace »

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…

What are some AI frameworks you really like working with? Any that go overlooked by others?

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#129

Post by toxik »

mFixman wrote: post #122
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 Kudos to Google for hiring extremely competent people, but I'm surprised that the creator and main architect of Keras hadn't been promoted to Staff Engineer at minimum.

Hierarchy aside, I am surprised the literal author and maintainer of the project, on Google’s payroll no less, was not consulted on such a decision. Seems borderline arrogant.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#130

Post by Borchy »

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…

Hello, Francois! My question isn't related directly to the big news, but to a lecture you gave recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7_NlkBwdj8&ab_channel=Machi... At 20:45 you say "So you cannot prepare in advance for ARC. You cannot just solve ARC by memorizing the solutions in advance." And at 24:45 "There's a chance that you could achieve this score by purely memorizing patterns and reciting them." Isn't that a contradiction? The way I understand it on one hand you are saying ARC can't be memorized on the other you are saying it can?
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