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Francois Chollet is leaving Google

(developers.googleblog.com)
377 points xnx | 6 comments | 13 Nov 24 22:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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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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openrisk ◴[14 Nov 24 10:20 UTC] No.42134763[source]▶
> It's not ossified but efficient.

These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what?

> If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employees

Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy?

And given an organization's size, what determines the height of its "pyramid"?

The fact that management consultancies are making (in perpetuity) a plush living by helping reduce "middle management layers" tells you explicitly that the beast has a life of its own.

Empire building and vicious internal politics that are disconnected from any sense of "efficiency" are pretty much part of "professional bureaucracies" - just as they are of the public sector ones. And whether we are clients, users or citizens we pay the price.

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Barrin92 ◴[14 Nov 24 10:55 UTC] No.42135001[source]▶
>These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what?

Compared to numerous small companies of the aggregate same size. It's not just an assertion, Google (and other big companies) produces incredibly high rates of value per employee and goods at extremely low costs to consumers.

>Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy?

Coase told us the answer to this[1]. Organizations are going to be as large as they can possibly be until the internal cost of organization is larger than the external costs of transaction with other organizations. How large that is depends on the tools available to organize and the quality of organization, but tends larger over time because management techniques and information sharing tools become more sophisticated.

The reason why large organizations are efficient is obvious if you turn it on its head. If we were all single individual organizations billing each other invoices we'd have maximum transaction costs and overhead. Bureaucracy and hierarchies minimize this overhead by turning it into a dedicated disciplines and rationalize that process. A city of 5 million people, centrally administered produces more economic value than a thousand villages with the same aggregate population.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937...

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1. openrisk ◴[14 Nov 24 11:23 UTC] No.42135157[source]▶
Economic arguments almost always apply strictly to idealized worlds where each individual calculates the pennies for each action etc. The degree to which such deductions apply to the real world varies. In this case large bureaucracies are everywhere in the public sector as well, where, at least to first order, price mechanisms, profit maximization etc. are not the driving force. Hierarchy of some form is innate to human organization, this is not the point.

The alternative to a large organization with a sky-high hierarchy is not an inefficient solopreneur but a smaller organization with (possibly) a flater hierarchy. Even strictly within the Coase logic the "external cost" can be artificially low (non-priced externalities [1]), ranging from the mental health of employees, to the impact of oligopolistic markets on society's welfare etc. This creates an unusually generous buffer for "internal costs".

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

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2. Majromax ◴[14 Nov 24 13:35 UTC] No.42136020[source]▶
> In this case large bureaucracies are everywhere in the public sector as well, where, at least to first order, price mechanisms, profit maximization etc. are not the driving force.

I'd say that large bureaucracies are endemic to the public sector in large part because they can't use efficient price or profit mechanisms.

A firm doesn't typically operate like a market internally, but instead it operates like a command economy. Orders flow from the top to be implemented at lower levels, feedback goes the other way, and divisions should generally be more collaborative than competitive.

Bureaucracy manages that command economy, and some amount of it is inevitable. However, inevitability does not mean infallibility, and bureaucracies in general are prone to process orientation, empire-building, and status-based backstabbing.

> ranging from the mental health of employees

Nitpick: I think that disregard of employee mental health is bad, but I don't think it's an unpriced externality. Employees are aware of their own mental health and can factor it into their internal compensation/quality-of-life tradeoff, staying in the job only when the salary covers the stress.

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3. robertlagrant ◴[14 Nov 24 13:55 UTC] No.42136146[source]▶
I agree with all of that.

I think the main differences between private sector bureacracy and public sector bureaucracy are:

- I'm forced to fund the public sector bureaucracy

- There's no competitive pressure putting a lid on public sector bureaucracy

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4. svara ◴[14 Nov 24 15:32 UTC] No.42137174[source]▶
> Economic arguments almost always apply strictly to idealized worlds where each individual calculates the pennies for each action etc. The degree to which such deductions apply to the real world varies.

But the assumption that individuals actually make that calculation is not necessary for economic models to be useful.

For example, players who act in a game theoretically optimal way in some game will, over the long run, dominate and displace players who don't.

This is true even if those players don't actually know any game theory.

5. mainecoder ◴[14 Nov 24 18:35 UTC] No.42139515{3}[source]▶
There is a competitive pressure on public center bureaucracy it is the competition for resources between countries sometimes it is was sometimes it is not but ultimately the public sector will be punished from the outside.
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6. robertlagrant ◴[15 Nov 24 10:15 UTC] No.42145516{4}[source]▶
Eventually, but tax systems are usually very efficient, and feel the pain a lot later.

There is some competitive pressure with pro-business politicians wanting things to be better, but unless you're in the team seeing the problems I think they struggle to spot what could actually be improved.