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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#141

Post by openrisk »

robertlagrant wrote: post #134
openrisk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There have been countless proposals for alternative systems. Last-in, first-out from memory is holacracy [1] "Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy".

Not sure there has been an opportunity to objectively test what are the pros and cons of all the possibilities. The mix of historical happenstance, vested interests, ideology, expedience, habit etc. that determines what is actually happening does not leave much room for observing alternatives.

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

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#142

Post by braza »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #41
osm3000 wrote: post #31

I loved Keras at the beginning of my PhD, 2017. But it was just the wrong abstraction: too easy to start with, too difficult to create custom things (e.g., custom loss function). I really tried to understand TensorFlow, I managed to make a for-loop in a week. Nested for-loop proved to be impossible. PyTorch was just perfect out of the box. I don't think I would have finished my PhD in time if it wasn't for PyTorch. I…

Keras was a miracle coming from writing stuff in Theano back in the day though.

Of course, it's easy to be ideological and defend technology A or B nowadays, but I agree 100% that in 2016/2016 Keras was the first touchpoint of several people and companies with Deep Learning.

The ecosystem, roughly speaking was: * Theano: Verbosity nightmare * Torch: Not-user friendly * Lasagne: A complex attraction on top of Theano. * Caffe: No flexibility at all, anything not the traditional architectures would be hard to implement * Tensor Flow: Unnecessarily complex API and no debuggability

I do not say that Keras solved all those things right away, but honestly, until just the fact that you could implement some Deep Learning architecture in 2017 on top of Keras I believe was one of the critical moments in Deep Learning history.

Of course today people have different preferences and I understand why PyTorch had its leap, but Keras was in my opinion the best piece of software back in the day to work with Deep Learning.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#143

Post by braza »

minimaxir wrote: post #4

Genuine question: who is using Keras in production nowadays? I've done a few work projects in Keras/TensorFlow over the years and it created a lot of technical debt and lost time debugging it, with said issues disappearing once I switched to PyTorch. The training loop with Keras for simple model is indeed easier and faster than PyTorch oriented helpers (e.g. Lightning AI, Hugging Face accelerate) but much, much less…

I implemented Keras in Production in 2019 (Computer Vision Classification for Fraud Detection) in my previous employer and I got in touch with the current team, they are happy and still using it in production with small updates only (security updates).

In our case, we made some ensembling with several small models using Keras. Our secret sauce at that time was in the specificity of our data and the labeling.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#144

Post by 12345hn6789 »

tgma wrote: 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.

Google is no longer the hot place to be. These blog posts are just soft launches of the engineers new companies. They're googlers, they know you gotta repeat yourself over and over to get mind share going :)

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#145

Post by rubiquity »

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.

Google being arrogant? Say it isn’t so!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#146

Post by svara »

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…

> 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.

But the assumption that individuals actually make that calculation is not necessary for economic models to be useful.

For example, players who act in a game theoretically optimal way in some game will, over the long run, dominate and displace players who don't.

This is true even if those players don't actually know any game theory.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#148

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

trott wrote: post #30
fastball wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of ARC-AGI and think it was worth a shot. But if someone has already hit the human-level threshold, I think the entire idea can be thrown out. If the ARC-AGI challenge did not actually follow their expected graph[1], I see no reason to believe that any benchmark can be designed in a way where it cannot be gamed. Rather, it seems that the existing SOTA models just weren't well-optimized for that one ta…

> But if someone has already hit the human-level threshold There is some controversy over what the human-level threshold is. A recent and very extensive study measured just 60.2% using Amazon Mechanical Turkers, for the same setup [1]. But the Turkers had no prior experience with the dataset, and were only given 5 tasks each. Regardless, I believe ARC-AGI should aim for a higher threshold than what average humans ach…

It is scientific malpractice to use Mechanical Turk to establish a human-level baseline for cognitively-demanding tasks, even if you ignore the issue of people outsourcing tasks to ChatGPT. The pay is abysmal and if it seems like the task is purely academic and hence part of a study, there is almost no incentive to put in effort: researchers won't deny payment for a bad answer. Since you get paid either way, there is a strong incentive to quickly give up thinking about a tricky ARC problem and simply guess a solution. (IQ tests in general have this problem: cynicism and laziness are indistinguishable from actual mistakes.)

Note that across all MTurk workers, 790/800 of evaluation tasks were successfully completed. I think 98% is actually a better number for human performance than 60%, as a proxy for "how well would a single human of above-average intelligence perform if they put maximal effort into each question?" It is an overestimate, but 60% is a vast underestimate.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#149

Post by oooyay »

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.

Down leveling is a pretty common strategy larger companies use to retain engineers.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#150

Post by modeless »

modeless wrote: post #33
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you see that he was poached by Anthropic?

I am not suggesting that I know it for a fact. I do recall some speculation on X to that effect but I can't find it now. Maybe just because Anthropic has been getting a lot of people lately.

Mystery solved: he's founding a startup: https://x.com/fchollet/status/1857012265024696494
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