AI Pioneer Chollet Exits Google

A big name in AI, Francois Chollet, is leaving Google after almost ten years there

Chollet wrote on X that he is starting a new business with “a friend,” but he wouldn’t say anything else.

He said, “I’m very thankful for my ten years at Google.” “During that time, deep learning went from being a small field of study to a huge industry with millions of jobs.”

Chollet is probably best known for making Keras, an open-source, high-level API that can be used to build AI models and do machine learning jobs. A Google developer blog post says Keras has over two million users and powers many well-known tech products, such as Waymo’s self-driving cars and the recommendation engines on YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify.

Chollet released the ARC-AGI benchmark in 2019. It checks how well AI systems can solve new thinking problems. This year, he started the ARC Prize, a $1 million race to beat ARC-AGI. (It’s still not won.)

Chollet won the Global Swiss AI Award in 2021 for making big steps forward in AI. Time magazine named him one of AI’s 100 most important people in September.

Chollet announced that Jeff Carpenter, a machine learning engineer at Google, will be taking over as Keras’s team lead.

In his post, Chollet said, “I have full faith in Jeff and the incredibly talented Keras team to keep pushing the limits of what’s possible in deep learning.” “From the outside, I will stay very involved with the Keras project.”