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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#71

Post by satyanash »

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…

> "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 Google back then.

The fact that an "L8" at Google ranks above an OSS maintainer of a super-popular library "L5" is incredibly interesting. How are these levels determined? Doesn't this represent a conflict of interest between the FOSS library and Google's own motivations? The maintainer having to pick between a great paycheck or control of the library (with the impending possibility of Google forking).

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#72

Post by fchollet »

blixt wrote: post #70
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…

Will you come back to Europe?

I will still be US-based for the time being. I'm seeing great things happening on the AI scene in Paris, though!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#73

Post by openrisk »

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 and that was an L8 decision

omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country.

It must be saying something profound about the human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#74

Post by Auracle »

hiddencost wrote: post #62
zxexz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I think $100M is totally enough to train a SotA "foundation model". It's all in the use case. I'd love to hear explicit arguments against this.

There's a bunch of failed AI companies who raised been $100M and $200M with the goal of training foundation models. What they discovered is that they were rapidly out paced by the large players, and didn't have any way to generate revenue. You're right that it's enough to train one, but IMO you're wrong that it's enough to build a company around.

I imagine Black Forest Labs (Flux) is doing alright, at least for now. I still feel like they’re missing out on some hanging fruit financially though.

But yeah, you’re not going to make any money making yet another LLM unless it’s somehow special.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#75

Post by dkga »

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…

Hi François, just wanted to take the opportunity to tell you how much your work has been important for me. Both at the start, getting into deep learning (both keras and the book) and now with keras3 as I'm working to spread DL techniques in economics. The multi-backend is really a massive boon, as it also helps ensure that the API would remain both standardised and simple, which is very helpful to evangelise new users that are used to higher-level scripting languages as my crowd is.

In any case, I just want to say how much an inspiration the keras work has been and continues to be. Merci, François !

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#76

Post by trott »

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, François, and good luck!

Q: The ARC Prize blog mentions that you plan to make ARC harder for machines and easier for humans. I'm curious if it will be adapted to resist scaling the training dataset (Like what BARC did -- see my other comment here)? As it stands today, I feel like the easiest approach to solving it would be BARC x10 or so, rather than algorithmic inventions.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#77

Post by fchollet »

trott wrote: post #76
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, François, and good luck! Q: The ARC Prize blog mentions that you plan to make ARC harder for machines and easier for humans. I'm curious if it will be adapted to resist scaling the training dataset (Like what BARC did -- see my other comment here)? As it stands today, I feel like the easiest approach to solving it would be BARC x10 or so, rather than algorithmic inventions.

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 making in harder to find the solution program by generating random programs built on a DSL, and in the sense of making it harder to guess the test tasks via brute force task generation). We'll keep the human facing difficulty roughly constant, which will be controlled via human testing.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#78

Post by fchollet »

dkga wrote: post #75
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…

Hi François, just wanted to take the opportunity to tell you how much your work has been important for me. Both at the start, getting into deep learning (both keras and the book) and now with keras3 as I'm working to spread DL techniques in economics. The multi-backend is really a massive boon, as it also helps ensure that the API would remain both standardised and simple, which is very helpful to evangelise new user…

Thanks for the kind words -- glad Keras has been useful!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#79

Post by darkwizard42 »

satyanash wrote: post #71
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…

> "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 designates that they were a tenured (but not designated Senior) software engineer. It doesn't meant they don't have a voice in these discussions (very likely an L8 reached out to learn more about the issue, the options, and ideally considered Francois's role and expertise before making a decision), it just means its above their pay grade.

I'll let Francois provide more detail on the exact situation.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#80

Post by fchollet »

satyanash wrote: post #71
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…

> "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…

This is just the standard Google ladder. Your initial level when you join is based on your past experience. Then you gain levels by going through the infamous promo process. L8 represents the level of Director.

Yes, there are conflicts of interests inherent to the fact that OSS maintainers are usually employed by big tech companies (since OSS itself doesn't make money). And it is often the case that big tech companies leverage their involvement in OSS development to further their own strategic interests and undermine their competitors, such as in the case of Meta, or to a lesser extent Google. But without the involvement of big tech companies, you would see a lot less open-source in the world. So you can view it as a trade off.

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