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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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1. Cthulhu_ ◴[14 Nov 24 10:24 UTC] No.42134788[source]▶
I personally can't relate, but that's because I've never been in any organization at that scale, biggest companies I've been had employees numbering in the thousands, of which IT was only hundreds at most. There you go as far as having scrum teams with developers, alongside that one or more architect, and "above" that a CTO. Conversely, companies like Google have tens of thousands of people in IT alone.

But likewise, since we're fans of equality in my country, there's no emphasis on career ladders / progression; you're a developer, maybe a lead developer or architect, and then you get to management, with the only distinguishing factor being your years of experience, length of your CV, and pay grade. Pay grade is "simply" bumped up every year based on performance of both you personally and the company as a whole.

But that's n=1 experience, our own company is moving towards a career ladder system now as well. Not nearly as extensive as the big companies' though.