To give you an idea of how much compute it took, they spent two million dollars for one run on a relatively toy dataset, CIFAR-10. Imagine how much it would take on an imagenet sized dataset! Can your company afford ~$20 million+ per dataset?
I do think that hyperparameter twiddling aspect might get automated, but believe me, that is much welcomed by the DL research community! I would much rather spend my time on new ideas rather than trying ten different initializations :)
Chromium is very open. In many cases, Google has to ask permission from outside contributors to commit code, since the outside contributors are the "boss" of part of the codebase.
Tensorflow is closer to chromiums model. There are a lot of external contributors.
Could you maybe comment on why this is the case? Are there technical reasons for that?
(Warning: I'm biased. I compete VERY heavily with anything google including cloud and their deep learning framework.)
Would it be bad if TensorFlow became the default library for deep learning? For companies that aren't Google, yes. Many organizations don't like how Google's controlled Android development.
But I think an important part of Dean's lecture are the slides that talk about making ML/DL expertise obsolete. That's the future, whether you use TensorFlow or not.