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.

what does this comment even mean? how does an L8 telling an L5 to do something a reflection of a "gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country."? i can't figure out the salience of any of the 3 adjectives (nor third world).

> human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.

...how else do you propose to dominate a landscape? do you know of any landscapes (real or metaphorical) that are dominated by a single person? and what does this have to do with the human condition? you know that lots of other animals organize into hierarchies right?

if this comment weren't so short i'd swear it was written by chatgpt.

well others seems to be getting the meaning (whether they agree or not is another matter), so you might be too habituated to the "L" world to bother understanding?

> if this comment weren't so short i'd swear it was written by chatgpt.

ditto