François Chollet Departs Google After a Decade to Launch New AI Venture

François Chollet is making a big change. After nearly ten years, he’s leaving Google.

In a recent post on X, the 34-year-old French developer shared his plans. He’s starting a new company with a friend. However, he didn’t go into many details.

Chollet expressed gratitude for his time at Google. He noted, “I’m very grateful for my decade at Google. In that timespan, deep learning went from a niche academic topic to a massive industry employing millions.”

Many people know Chollet as the creator of Keras. It’s a high-level, open-source API that helps developers build AI models and tackle machine learning tasks. According to Google’s developer blog, Keras has over 2 million users. It powers important tech products, including Waymo’s self-driving cars and the recommendation engines for YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify.

In 2019, he introduced the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence, or ARC-AGI. This benchmark measures how well AI systems can solve new reasoning problems. This year, he also launched the ARC Prize, a $1 million competition to beat ARC-AGI, which has yet to be won.

Chollet has often challenged the traditional approach many labs take. He believes that simply feeding more data and computational power to models won’t create AI as “smart” as humans. Instead, he advocates for methods that allow models to reason in more human-like ways, such as neuro-symbolic AI.

In 2021, he earned the Global Swiss AI Award for his breakthroughs in the field. Recently, Time recognized him as one of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Chollet envisions superintelligent AI as a tool for advancing human knowledge. He said, “Artificial general intelligence is going to be a kind of super-competent scientist.”

As he transitions, Chollet announced that Jeff Carpenter, a machine learning engineer at Google, will take over as the team lead for Keras. He expressed confidence in Jeff and the talented Keras team, stating, “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 plans to stay involved with the Keras project from the outside. His journey continues, and the AI community will be watching closely.