←back to thread

Francois Chollet is leaving Google

(developers.googleblog.com)
377 points xnx | 3 comments | 13 Nov 24 22:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.416s | source
Show context
fchollet ◴[14 Nov 24 07:27 UTC] No.42133844[source]▶
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, Square/Block, X/Twitter, and many non-tech companies like United, JPM, Orange, Walmart, etc. In total Keras has ~2M developers and powers ML at many companies big and small. This isn't all TF -- many of our users have started running Keras on JAX or PyTorch.

"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. Making Keras multi-backend again in 2023 has been one of my favorite projects to work on, both from the engineering & architecture side of things but also because the product is truly great (also, I love JAX)!

replies(20): >>42133884 #>>42133989 #>>42134014 #>>42134046 #>>42134074 #>>42134092 #>>42134212 #>>42134240 #>>42134249 #>>42134580 #>>42134819 #>>42134892 #>>42134936 #>>42134946 #>>42135297 #>>42135510 #>>42135776 #>>42135839 #>>42136118 #>>42136329 #
satyanash ◴[14 Nov 24 07:59 UTC] No.42134014[source]▶
> "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).

replies(3): >>42134144 #>>42134156 #>>42134187 #
1. lrpahg ◴[14 Nov 24 08:31 UTC] No.42134187[source]▶
> 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.

replies(2): >>42134775 #>>42134790 #
2. yazaddaruvala ◴[14 Nov 24 10:21 UTC] No.42134775[source]▶
The IC ladder at Google grows from L3 up to L10.

An L8 IC has similar responsibilities as a Director (roughly 100ish people) but rather than people, and priority responsibility it is systems, architecture, reliability responsibility.

3. anilgulecha ◴[14 Nov 24 10:24 UTC] No.42134790[source]▶
L5 isn't the highest IC level at Google. Broadly would go up to L10, but the ratio at every level is ~1:4 or 1:5 b/w IC levels.

The L7/L8 level engineers I've spoken or worked with have definitely earned it - they bring to bear significant large scale systems knowledge and bring it to bear on very large problem statements. Impact would be felt on billion$ impact wise.