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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#41

Post by hooloovoo_zoo »

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.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#42

Post by hiddencost »

paxys wrote: post #21
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.

More generally, there is unlimited opportunity in the AI space today, especially for someone of his stature, and staying tied to Google probably isn't as enticing. He can walk into any VC office and raise a hundred million dollars by the end of the day to build whatever he wants.

$100M isn't enough capital for an AI startup that's training foundation models, sadly.

A ton of folks of similar stature who raised that much burnt it within two years and took mediocre exits.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#43

Post by echelon »

nl wrote: post #26
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…

> The only way to measure "AGI" is in however you define the "G" "I" isn't usefully defined either. At least most people agree on "Artificial"

That's the problem with intelligence vs the other things we're doing with deep learning.

Vision models, image models, video models, audio models? Solved. We've understood the physics of optics and audio for over half a century. We've had ray tracers for forever. It's all well understood, and now we're teaching models to understand it.

Intelligence? We can't even describe our own.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#44

Post by crystal_revenge »

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 correspond with him a bit) for many years now, and I wouldn't be surprised if the desire to create something became more important than the comfort of Google.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#45

Post by ic_fly2 »

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…

We run a decent Keras model on production.

I don’t need a custom loss function, so keras is just fine.

From the article it sounds like Waymo run on Keras. Last I checked Waymo was doing better than the PyTorch powered Uber effort.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#46

Post by adultSwim »

magicalhippo wrote: post #13
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…

As someone who hasn't really used either, what's pytorch doing that's so much better?

Being successful is also why it's better. PyTorch has a thriving ecosystem of software around it and a large userbase. Picking it comes with many network benefits.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#47

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

I wonder how/if that mentality will shift over time. As it seems the market capture phase it over and the current big tech aren't simply keeping top talent around as a capture piece anymore.

Maybe they'll still do it, but basically only if it feels you can startup a billion dollar business. As opposed to a million dollar one.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#48

Post by dmafreezone »

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…

It’s the other way around. Working at Google (or any other FAANG) for a time period past your personal “bullshit limit” will ensure you will never do anything ambitious with your life ever again.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#49

Post by dmafreezone »

paxys wrote: post #21
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.

More generally, there is unlimited opportunity in the AI space today, especially for someone of his stature, and staying tied to Google probably isn't as enticing. He can walk into any VC office and raise a hundred million dollars by the end of the day to build whatever he wants.

[flagged]

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#50

Post by NitpickLawyer »

hiddencost wrote: post #42
paxys wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More generally, there is unlimited opportunity in the AI space today, especially for someone of his stature, and staying tied to Google probably isn't as enticing. He can walk into any VC office and raise a hundred million dollars by the end of the day to build whatever he wants.

$100M isn't enough capital for an AI startup that's training foundation models, sadly. A ton of folks of similar stature who raised that much burnt it within two years and took mediocre exits.

I think we'll start to see a differentiation soon. The likes of Ilya will raise money to do whatever, including foundation models / new arch, while other startups will focus on post-training, scaling inference, domain adaptation and so on.

I don't think the idea of general foundational model from scratch is a good path for startups anymore. We're already seeing specialised verticals (cursor, codeium, both at ~100-200m funding rounds) and they're both focused on specific domains, not generalist. There's probably enough "foundation" models out there to start working on post-training stuff already, no need to reinvent the wheel.

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