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Francois Chollet, a leading figure in the AI world, is leaving Google after close to a decade.
In a post on X, the 34-year-old French developer said he’s starting a new company with “a friend” — but declined to reveal additional details.
“I’m very grateful for my decade at Google,” Chollet said. “In that timespan, deep learning went from a niche academic topic to a massive industry employing millions.”
Chollet is perhaps best known as the creator of Keras, a high-level, open-source API that can be used to create AI models and tackle machine learning tasks. A post on Google’s developer blog notes that Keras has over two million users, and powers a number of high-profile tech products, from Waymo’s self-driving cars to the recommendation engines on YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify.
In 2019, Chollet published the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) benchmark, which measures the ability of AI systems to solve novel reasoning problems. This year, he launched the ARC Prize, a $1 million competition to beat ARC-AGI. (It remains unwon.)
Chollet has often argued that the approach taken by many of the major labs developing AI — feeding ever more data and computational resources to models — won’t achieve AI that’s as “smart” as humans. Instead, he believes, methods that help models to “reason” in more human-like ways, like neuro-symbolic AI, are the most promising path forward.
In 2021, Chollet won the Global Swiss AI Award for breakthroughs in AI. And in September, he was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in AI.
Chollet told Time that he envisions superintelligent AI as a tool for advancing human knowledge. “Artificial general intellgience is going to be a kind of super-competent scientist,” he said.
Chollet said that Jeff Carpenter, a machine learning engineer at Google, will be taking over as team lead for Keras.
“I have full confidence in Jeff and the incredibly talented Keras team to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in deep learning,” Chollet wrote in his post. “I will stay deeply involved with the Keras project from the outside.”
Kyle Wiggers is a senior reporter at TechCrunch with a special interest in artificial intelligence. His writing has appeared in VentureBeat and Digital Trends, as well as a range of gadget blogs including Android Police, Android Authority, Droid-Life, and XDA-Developers. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner, a piano educator, and dabbles in piano himself. occasionally — if mostly unsuccessfully.
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