Francois Chollet is leaving Google

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)!

> 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.

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.

> 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.

>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...

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