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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#81

Post by fchollet »

hashtag-til wrote: post #68
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…

Congratulations Francois! Thanks for maintaining Keras for such a long time and overcoming the corporate politics to get it where it is now. I've been using it since early 2016 and it has been present all my career. It is something I use as the definitive example of how to do things right in the Python ecosystem. Obviously, all the best wishes for you and your friend in the new venture!!

Thank you!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#82

Post by lrpahg »

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…

> How are these levels determined?

I have no knowledge of Google, but if L5 is the highest IC rank, then L8 will often be obtained through politics and playing the popularity game.

The U.S. corporate system is set up to humiliate and exploit real contributors. The demeaning term "IC" is a reflection of that. It is also applied when someone literally writes a whole application and the idle corporate masters stand by and take the credit.

Unfortunately, this is also how captured "open" source projects like Python work these days.

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#83

Post by imfing »

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…

just wanna take this chance to say a huge thank you for all the amazing work you’ve done with Keras!

back in 2017, Keras was my introductory framework to deep learning. it’s simple, Pythonic interface made finetuning models so much easier back then.

also glad to see Keras continue to thrive after getting merged into TF, especially with the new multi-backend support.

wishing you all the best in your new adventure!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#84

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#85

Post by bootywizard »

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 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?

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#86

Post by schmorptron »

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…

Hey,I really liked your little book of deep learning, even though I didn't understand everything in it yet. Thanks for writing it!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#87

Post by fchollet »

bootywizard wrote: post #85
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 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 :)

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#88

Post by fchollet »

schmorptron wrote: post #86
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…

Hey,I really liked your little book of deep learning, even though I didn't understand everything in it yet. Thanks for writing it!

Enjoy the book!

Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google

#89

Post by fchollet »

tadeegan wrote: post #2

I guess they realized muilti-backend keras is futile? I never liked the tf.keras apis and the docs always promosed multi backend but then I guess they were never able to deliver that without breaking keras 3 changes. And even now.... "Keras 3 includes a brand new distribution API, the keras.distribution namespace, currently implemented for the JAX backend (coming soon to the TensorFlow and PyTorch backends)". I don't…

Actually, `keras.distribution` is straightforward to implement in TF DTensor and with the experimental PyTorch SPMD API. We haven't done it yet first because these APIs are experimental (only JAX is mature) and second because all the demand for large-model distribution at Google was towards the JAX backend.
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