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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#131

Post by fchollet »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #128
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?

My go-to DL stack is Keras 3 + JAX. W&B is a great tool as well. I think JAX is generally under-appreciated compared to how powerful it is.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#132

Post by Majromax »

openrisk wrote: post #121
Barrin92 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 hu…

> 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.

I'd say that large bureaucracies are endemic to the public sector in large part because they can't use efficient price or profit mechanisms.

A firm doesn't typically operate like a market internally, but instead it operates like a command economy. Orders flow from the top to be implemented at lower levels, feedback goes the other way, and divisions should generally be more collaborative than competitive.

Bureaucracy manages that command economy, and some amount of it is inevitable. However, inevitability does not mean infallibility, and bureaucracies in general are prone to process orientation, empire-building, and status-based backstabbing.

> ranging from the mental health of employees

Nitpick: I think that disregard of employee mental health is bad, but I don't think it's an unpriced externality. Employees are aware of their own mental health and can factor it into their internal compensation/quality-of-life tradeoff, staying in the job only when the salary covers the stress.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#133

Post by harisec »

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…

Congrats, good luck with your new company!

I have one question regarding your ARC Prize competition: The current leader from the leaderboard (MindsAI) seems not to be following the original intention of the competition (fine tune a model with millions of tasks similar with the ARC tasks). IMO this is against the goal/intention of the competition, the goal being to find a novel way to get neural networks to generalize from a few samples. You can solve almost anything by brute-forcing it (fine tunning on millions of samples). If you agree with me, why is the MindsAI solution accepted?

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#134

Post by robertlagrant »

openrisk wrote: post #113
cool-RR wrote: post #103

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. 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 somewher…

> Aspects that may have little to do with any meritocracy, reasonableness, fairness etc. become the deciding factors...

If you're not presenting an alterative system, then is it still the best one you can think of?

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#135

Post by mattmcknight »

openrisk wrote: post #109
almostgotcaught wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where's the evidence of it being ossified?

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#136

Post by robertlagrant »

Majromax wrote: post #132
openrisk wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hu…

> 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. I'd say that large bureaucracies are endemic to the public sector in large part because they can't use efficient price or profit mechanisms. A firm doesn't typically operate like a market internally, but instead it operates like a command…

I agree with all of that.

I think the main differences between private sector bureacracy and public sector bureaucracy are:

- I'm forced to fund the public sector bureaucracy

- There's no competitive pressure putting a lid on public sector bureaucracy

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#137

Post by Skylyz »

versteegen wrote: post #101
fchollet wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'v…

I had never thought about how close perception and reasoning are from a computational point of view, the parts of ARC that we call "reasoning" seem to just be operations that the human brain is not predisposed to solve easily.

A very interesting corollary is that the first AGIs might be way better thinkers than humans by default because of how they can seamlessly integrate new programs into their cognition in a perfect symbiosis with computers.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#138

Post by danielthor »

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…

Thank you for Keras! Working with Tensorflow before Keras was so painful. When I first read the news I was just thinking you would make a great lead for the tools infra at a place like Anthropic, but working on your own thing is even more exciting. Good luck!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#139

Post by ignoramous »

toxik wrote: post #129
mFixman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> ... was not consulted on such a decision ...

What Francois wrote suggests he was overruled.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#140

Post by petters »

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.

It takes a while to get promoted, but he certainly did not leave as L5
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