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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#151

Post by robertlagrant »

openrisk wrote: post #141
robertlagrant wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pro…

But how do you know that Holocracy is more reasonable or fair? The Wikipedia article you linked isn't exactly glowing!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#152

Post by Skylyz »

fchollet wrote: post #87
bootywizard wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Francois, congrats on leaving Google! ARC and On the Measure of Intelligence have both had a phenomenal impact on my thinking and understanding of the overall field. Do you think that working on ARC is one of the most high leverage ways an individual can hope to have impact on the broad scientific goal of AGI?

That's what I plan on doing -- so I would say yes :)

François as a contestant of ARC prize ?! For real ?

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#153

Post by Skylyz »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #90

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

These are comforting for sure if you're scared about your future as a SWE.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#155

Post by crystal_revenge »

ak_111 wrote: post #127
kristopolous wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I'm guessing you've never experience working at an early stage startup?

At a 3 "90% of the time you are basically just hacking" is sounds fun, but I personally find it much more rewarding to see each week's work making incremental but visible changes not only in the product but the company itself.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#156

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

fchollet wrote: post #100
c1b wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Francois, I'm a huge fan of your work! In projecting ARC challenge progress with a naive regression from the latest cycle of improvement (from 34% to 54%), it seems that a plausible estimate as to when the 85% target will be reached is sometime between late 2025 & mid 2026. Supposing ARC challenge target is reached in the coming years, does this update your model of 'AI risk'? // Would this cause you to consider y…

This roughly aligns with my timeline. ARC will be solved within a couple of years. There is a distinction between solving ARC, creating AGI, and creating an AI that would represent an existential risk. ARC is a stepping stone towards AGI, so the first model that solves ARC should have taught us something fundamental about how to create truly general intelligence that can adapt to never-seen-before problem, but it wil…

ARC as a stepping-stone for AGI? For me, ARC has lost all credibility. Your white paper that introduced it claimed that core knowledge priors are needed to solve it, yet all the systems that have any non-zero performance on ARC so far have made no attempt to learn or implement core knowledge priors. You have claimed at different times and in different forms that ARC is protected against memorisation-based Big Data approaches, but the systems that currently perform best on ARC do it by generating thousands of new training examples for some LLM, the quintessential memorisation-based Big Data approach.

I too, believe that ARC will soon be solved: in the same way that the Winograd Schema Challenge was solved. Someone will finally decide to generate a large enough dataset to fine-tune a big, deep, bad LLM and go to town, and I do mean on the private test set. If ARC was really, really a test of intelligence and therefore protected against Big Data approaches, then it wouldn't need to have a super secret hidden test set. Bongard Problems don't and they still stand undefeated (although the ANN community has sidestepped them in a sense, by generating and solving similar, but not identical, sets of problems, then claiming triumph anyway).

ARC will be solved and we won't learn anything at all from it, except that we still don't know how to test for intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence.

The worst outcome of all this is the collateral damage to the reputation of symbolic program synthesis which you have often name-dropped when trying to steer the efforts of the community towards it (other times calling it "discrete program search" etc). Once some big, compensating, LLM solves ARC, any mention of program synthesis will elicit nothing but sneers. "Program synthesis? Isn't that what Chollet thought would solve ARC? Well, we don't need that, LLMs can solve ARC just fine". Talk about sucking out all the air from the room, indeed.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#157

Post by mainecoder »

robertlagrant wrote: post #136
Majromax wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

There is a competitive pressure on public center bureaucracy it is the competition for resources between countries sometimes it is was sometimes it is not but ultimately the public sector will be punished from the outside.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#158

Post by Agingcoder »

kristopolous wrote: post #65
Agingcoder wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why zero executive control ? I’d expect a company like google ( like most large orgs ) to have a very large amount of internal code for internal clients, sometimes developer themselves. My experience of large orgs tells me you can have control over what you build - it depends on who you’re building it for ( external or internal)

That's not what I mean. I've got a deep interest in how a product is used, fits in a market, designed, experienced AND built. If I went to Google what I'd really want to do is gather up a bunch of people, rent out an away-from-Google office space and build say "search-next" - the response to the onslaught of entries currently successfully storming Google's castle. Do this completely detached and unmoored from Google'…

My point is that if you build internal products usually there’s a lot less convincing to do, and it’s much easier to get a lot of control ( no marketing, communication, etc ).

Now, if you want to ship a product to millions of people _and_ have full control over it, then a large org is indeed not the right place.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#159

Post by pie420 »

openrisk wrote: post #141
robertlagrant wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pro…

Every company I've seen that has tried Holacracy abandoned it shortly after.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#160

Post by kristopolous »

Agingcoder wrote: post #158
kristopolous wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I mean. I've got a deep interest in how a product is used, fits in a market, designed, experienced AND built. If I went to Google what I'd really want to do is gather up a bunch of people, rent out an away-from-Google office space and build say "search-next" - the response to the onslaught of entries currently successfully storming Google's castle. Do this completely detached and unmoored from Google'…

My point is that if you build internal products usually there’s a lot less convincing to do, and it’s much easier to get a lot of control ( no marketing, communication, etc ). Now, if you want to ship a product to millions of people _and_ have full control over it, then a large org is indeed not the right place.

Full control? nope.

A system to consider honest input without regard for job titles or hierarchy? yes!

For instance, I am not a UX designer but I do keep abreast of consumer perception and preference in whatever field I'm working in - almost like a stalker.

If a designer designs an interface and the feedback is clearly and unanimously negative, I should be able to present this and affect actual change in the product - not have my concerns heard, not considered, but to force actual remedial action taken to fundamentally address the issue.

If a competitor rolls out a new feature that is leading to a mass exodus of our customers, I should be able to demonstrate this without the managers whiffing about some vision that nobody gives a shit about or sprint planning responding to it in 6-months or having days of endlessly yapping. If the ship's got a leak my brother, it should be quickly and swiftly addressed.

It'd be like driving to lunch and your car catches on fire, you ignore it, and think about what you're going to be getting for dessert.

People realize these urgencies in IT/devops but teams that don't want to rock the boat as you gently glide over a waterfall are a complete waste of time.

So control? No. But if someone waves their hands and shout danger, they shouldn't be patronizingly patted on the head and told everything's under control.

In conventional large companies, that's exactly what happens. You're on a team, get assigned tickets, attend meetings, everyone calmly plays their roles and if you notice something in someone else's lane, you're supposed to politely stay quiet and watch everybody crash.

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