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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

(developers.googleblog.com)
377 points xnx | 5 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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cool-RR ◴[14 Nov 24 10:12 UTC] No.42134716[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.

No, it sounds like how most successful organizations work.

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1. openrisk ◴[14 Nov 24 10:42 UTC] No.42134913{3}[source]▶
Most large organizations are hugely bureucratic regardless of whether they are successful or not :-)

In any case the prompt for the thread is somebody mentioning their (subjective) view that the deep hiearachy they were operating under, made a "wrong call".

We'll never know if this true or not, but it points to the challenges for this type of organizational structure faces. Dynamics in remote layers floating somewhere "above your level" decide the fate of things. Aspects that may have little to do with any meritocracy, reasonableness, fairness etc. become the deciding factors...

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2. robertlagrant ◴[14 Nov 24 13:51 UTC] No.42136121[source]▶
> Aspects that may have little to do with any meritocracy, reasonableness, fairness etc. become the deciding factors...

If you're not presenting an alterative system, then is it still the best one you can think of?

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3. openrisk ◴[14 Nov 24 14:48 UTC] No.42136602[source]▶
There have been countless proposals for alternative systems. Last-in, first-out from memory is holacracy [1] "Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy".

Not sure there has been an opportunity to objectively test what are the pros and cons of all the possibilities. The mix of historical happenstance, vested interests, ideology, expedience, habit etc. that determines what is actually happening does not leave much room for observing alternatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy

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4. robertlagrant ◴[14 Nov 24 17:01 UTC] No.42138241{3}[source]▶
But how do you know that Holocracy is more reasonable or fair? The Wikipedia article you linked isn't exactly glowing!
5. pie420 ◴[14 Nov 24 19:46 UTC] No.42140364{3}[source]▶
Every company I've seen that has tried Holacracy abandoned it shortly after.