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François Chollet, a prominent AI researcher and software engineer, has significantly contributed to the development and democratization of deep learning technologies, making him a valuable figure for brands seeking insights into artificial intelligence and its applications.
François Chollet served as a Senior Staff Engineer at Google for over 9 years, contributing significantly to their AI research and development, particularly with the Keras library and enhancements to TensorFlow. He recently left Google to pursue AGI research through his new ventures. Google itself invests billions in fundamental AI research.
François Chollet is a co-founder of Ndea, a new startup focused on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with program synthesis. This venture was founded with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop after Chollet left Google.
François Chollet co-founded the ARC Prize, a US$1 million competition to solve the ARC-AGI benchmark, aimed at advancing research towards Artificial General Intelligence. In early 2025, ARC Prize expanded into a non-profit foundation to further guide and accelerate AGI research.
Manning Publications is the publisher of François Chollet's acclaimed books, 'Deep Learning with Python' (First and Second Editions) and 'Deep Learning With R' (co-authored with J. J. Allaire). These books introduce readers to deep learning using Python and the Keras library, and an R language version, respectively.
AFP has teamed up with Mistral AI, a partnership indirectly related to François Chollet's insights and the broader AI ecosystem he influences. This collaboration aims to leverage AI expertise for accurate news reporting.
François Chollet, born on October 20, 1989, is a French software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher. He obtained his Diplôme d’Ingénieur (Master of Engineering) from ENSTA Paris, part of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, in 2012. His career is marked by his focus on understanding abstraction, developing algorithms for autonomous abstraction, and democratizing AI technology. He aims to leverage AI to enhance personal agency and potential, including through applications in EdTech and recommendation engines. Chollet’s early work involved understanding and simulating human cognitive development. From 2011 to 2014, he created and maintained Wysp, a social network for artists with drawing tools, which reached 25,000 monthly active users. In 2014, he also created QuickAnswers.io, an online question-answering engine, which used a technique similar to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) before it was widely known.
Chollet is widely recognized as the creator of Keras, an open-source deep-learning library released in 2015. He joined Google in 2015 as a Senior Staff Engineer, shortly after Keras’s release. During his tenure at Google, he contributed to TensorFlow, a prominent machine learning platform, from 2015 to 2021. He also led and contributed to projects like Keras Tuner, for hyperparameter tuning, and AutoKeras, an automated machine learning library, both starting in 2019 and 2018 respectively. His academic contributions include numerous papers published in major AI conferences such as CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICLR. His paper “Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions” (2016) is among the most cited in CVPR proceedings with over 18,000 citations. He is also the author of the influential book “Deep Learning with Python,” which has sold over 100,000 copies, and co-author of “Deep Learning With R.”
In 2019, Chollet introduced the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) benchmark, designed to evaluate AI systems’ capacity for novel reasoning. In 2024, he launched the ARC Prize, a US$1 million competition aimed at solving this benchmark. He departed Google in November 2024 after over nine years to co-found a new startup with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop, focusing on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) through program synthesis. In early 2025, the ARC Prize expanded into a non-profit foundation, reinforcing its mission to guide and accelerate AGI research. His contributions have earned him recognition, including the Global Swiss AI Award in 2021 and being named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by TIME in September 2024.
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