Francois good luck with your new beginning. Your book (and aurelien one) greatly helped me entering this field
Francois Chollet is leaving Google
91–100 of 182 posts
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#92Do you plan to write more "fundamental" AI papers such as "On the measure of intelligence", do you plan to refine your ARC-AGI benchmark again?
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#93Do you plan to write more "fundamental" AI papers such as "On the measure of intelligence", do you plan to refine your ARC-AGI benchmark again?
Yes to both.
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#94Hello François, thank you for your great work to the Open Source community.
Aren't you worried that your work may only be profitable to some US-based interests that may backfire to your home country ? given the actual political situation...
France needs you, come back home.
This is not a judgment, just wondering about your opinion on it.
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#95Hi 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.
Bureaucracy as per Weber is simply 'rationally organized action'. It dominates because this is the appropriate way to manage hundreds of thousands of people in a impersonal, rule based and meritocratic way. Third world countries work the other way around, they don't have professional bureaucracies, they only have clans and families.
It's not ossified but efficient. If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employees were to make decisions by everyone talking to everyone else you can try to do the math on what the complexity of that is.
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Bureaucracy as per Weber is simply 'rationally organized action'. It dominates because this is the appropriate way to manage hundreds of thousands of people in a impersonal, rule based and meritocratic way. Third world countries work the other way around, they don't have professional bureaucracies, they only have clans and families. It's not ossified but efficient. If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employe…
effective, maybe. efficient... I would not be so sure.
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#97Hi 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.
what does this comment even mean? how does an L8 telling an L5 to do something a reflection of a "gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country."? i can't figure out the salience of any of the 3 adjectives (nor third world).
> human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.
...how else do you propose to dominate a landscape? do you know of any landscapes (real or metaphorical) that are dominated by a single person? and what does this have to do with the human condition? you know that lots of other animals organize into hierarchies right?
if this comment weren't so short i'd swear it was written by chatgpt.
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#98Hi 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, 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 your article on 'The implausibility of intelligence explosion' to be outdated?
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#99Earlier 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.
Chollet is a leading skeptic of the generality of LLMs (see arcprize.org). He surely isn't doing a startup to train another one.
Re: Francois Chollet is leaving Google
#100Hi 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, 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 will likely not itself be AGI (due to be specialized in the ARC format, for instance). Its architecture could likely be adapted into a genuine AGI, after a few iterations -- a system capable of solving novel scientific problems in any domain.
Even this would not clearly lead to "intelligence explosion". The points in my old article on intelligence explosion are still valid -- while AGI will lead to some level of recursive self-improvement (as do many other systems!) the available evidence just does not point to this loop triggering an exponential explosion (due to diminishing returns and the fact that "how intelligent one can be" has inherent limitations brought about by things outside of the AI agent itself). And intelligence on its own, without executive autonomy or embodiment, is just a tool in human hands, not a standalone threat. It can certainly present risks, like any other powerful technology, but it isn't a "new species" out to get us.