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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

(developers.googleblog.com)
377 points xnx | 1 comments | 13 Nov 24 22:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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)!

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openrisk ◴[14 Nov 24 08:05 UTC] No.42134046[source]▶
> 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.

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Barrin92 ◴[14 Nov 24 09:37 UTC] No.42134507[source]▶
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.

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1. dbspin ◴[14 Nov 24 10:11 UTC] No.42134706[source]▶
Bureaucracies are certainly impersonal, but you'd be at a loss to find one that's genuinely rule based and meritocratic. To the extent that they become remain rule based they are no longer effective and get routed around. To the extent that they're meritocratic, the same thing happens with networks of influence. Once you get high enough, or decentralised enough bureaucracies work like any other human tribes. Bureaucracies may sometimes be effective ways to cut down on nepotism (although they manifestly fail at that in my country), but they're machines for manifesting cronyism.