AI pioneer François Chollet leaves Google | TechCrunch

François 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 he declined to reveal many details.

“I’m very grateful for my decade at Google,” Chollet wrote in the post. “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 2 million users and powers a number of high-profile tech products, like Waymo’s self-driving cars, as well as 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 thinks that 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 super intelligent AI as a tool for advancing human knowledge. “Artificial general intelligence 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.”