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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#171

Post by fchollet »

Borchy wrote: post #169
versteegen wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the goal being to find a novel way to get neural networks to generalize from a few samples Remove "neural networks". Most ARC competitors aren't using NNs or even machine learning. I'm fairly sure NNs aren't needed here. > why is the MindsAI solution accepted? I hope you're not serious. They obviously haven't broken any rule. ARC is a benchmark. The point of a benchmark is to compare differing approaches. It's not…

I also don't understand why MindsAI is included. ARC is supposed to grade LLMs on their ability to generalize i.e. the higher score the more useful they are. If MindsAI scores x2 than the current SOTA then why are we wasting our $20 on inferior LLMs like ChatGPT adn Claude when we could be using the one-true-god MindsAI? If the answer is "because it's not a general-purpose LLM" then why is ARC marketed as the ultimat…

ARC was never supposed to grade LLMs! I designed the ARC format back when LLMs weren't a thing at all. It's a test of AI systems' ability to generalize to novel tasks.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#172

Post by fchollet »

Skylyz wrote: post #152
fchollet wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I will never enter ARC Prize myself, since I'm organizing it. But the reason I made ARC in the first place was to work on it myself! I intend to solve it (outside of the context of the competition).

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#173

Post by robertlagrant »

mainecoder wrote: post #157
robertlagrant wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eventually, but tax systems are usually very efficient, and feel the pain a lot later.

There is some competitive pressure with pro-business politicians wanting things to be better, but unless you're in the team seeing the problems I think they struggle to spot what could actually be improved.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#174

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

c1b wrote: post #162
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

Wow, you're the most passionate hater of ARC that I've seen. Your negativity seems laughably overblown to me. Are there benchmarks that you prefer?

This might be useful to you: if you want to have an interesting conversation, insulting your interlocutor is not the best way to go about it.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#175

Post by CyberDildonics »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #174
c1b wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you're the most passionate hater of ARC that I've seen. Your negativity seems laughably overblown to me. Are there benchmarks that you prefer?

This might be useful to you: if you want to have an interesting conversation, insulting your interlocutor is not the best way to go about it.

I don't think they are insulting anyone, I think they're just asking for numbers.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#176

Post by belter »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #79
satyanash wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Why did you decide to merge Keras into TensorFlow in 2019": I didn't! The decision was made in 2018 by the TF leads -- I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision. The TF team was huge at the time, 50+ people, while Keras was just me and the open-source community. In retrospect I think Keras would have been better off as an independent multi-backend framework -- but that would have required me quitting G…

L8 at Google is not a random pecking order level. L8s generally have massive systems design experience and decades of software engineering experience at all levels of scale. They make decisions at Google which can have impacts on the workflows of 100s of engineers on products with 100millions/billions of users. There are less L8s than there are technical VPs (excluding all the random biz side VP roles) L5 here design…

The history of the company does not seem to demonstrate such a semi-genius are capable of producing successful products. Can hardly be third on Cloud.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#177

Post by belter »

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…

Used to be called IBM :-)

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#178

Post by dekhn »

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.

The leadership of tensorflow (which was a political football) at the time was not particularly wise, or introspective, and certainly was not interested in hearing the opinions of the large number of talented junior and senior engineers. They were trying to thread the needle of growing a large external open source project while also satisfying the internal (very advanced) needs of researchers and product teams.

This was a common pattern at the time and it's part of the reason TF 2.0 became a debacle and jax was made as a side product that matured on its own before the directors got their hands on it.

Affecting leadership's decisions at Google became gradually more difficult over time. The L8s often were quite experienced in some area, but assumed their abilities generalized (for example, storage experts trying to design network distributed strategies for HPC).

Fortunately, with the exception of a few valuable datasets and some resources, effectively everything important about machine learning has been exported from Google into the literature and open source and it remains to be seen if google will ever recover from the exodus of the highly talented but mostly ignored junior and senior engineers who made it so productive in the past.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#179

Post by dekhn »

oooyay wrote: post #149
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.

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

Google in particular often downlevelled incoming engineers by one level from what their "natural" level should be- IE, a person who should have been an L6 would often be hired at L5 and then have to "prove themself" before getting that promo.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#180

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #175
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be useful to you: if you want to have an interesting conversation, insulting your interlocutor is not the best way to go about it.

I don't think they are insulting anyone, I think they're just asking for numbers.

What numbers?
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