AI Pioneer François Chollet Departs Google

A prominent pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, Francois Chollet, is quitting Google after working there for nearly a decade

The French developer, who is 34 years old, stated in a post on X that he is entering into a new business venture with “a friend,” but he failed to disclose many specifics about the venture.

In the post, Chollet said, “I am very grateful for my decade at Google.” During that space of time, deep learning went from being a specialized academic field to becoming a major industry that employs millions of people.

Keras is a high-level, open-source application programming interface (API) that may be used to develop artificial intelligence models and for machine learning tasks. Chollet is likely best recognized for being the creator of Keras.

Additionally, several high-profile technological products, such as Waymo’s self-driving cars, as well as the recommendation engines on YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify, are powered by Keras, according to a post published on the developer blog of Google. Keras has more than 2 million users.

The benchmark known as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) was published by Chollet in 2019. This benchmark evaluates the capacity of artificial intelligence systems to discover and answer unique reasoning problems.

This year, he introduced the ARC Prize, a competition with a prize pool of one million dollars to defeat ARC-AGI. (It has not yet been won.)

Several times, Chollet has claimed that the path that many of the main labs that are working on artificial intelligence are taking, which is to feed ever more data and computer resources to models, would not result in artificial intelligence that is as “smart” as humans.

On the other hand, he believes that the most promising route forward is to implement techniques that enable models to “reason” in more human-like ways, such as neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence.

Chollet was awarded the Global Swiss AI Award in 2021 for their significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. Time magazine recognized him as one of the 100 most influential people in the field of artificial intelligence in September.

Chollet shared with Time his idea of artificial intelligence that is so advanced that it may be used to further human knowledge. He made the statement that “artificial general intelligence is going to be a kind of super-competent scientist of the future.”

Chollet announced it that Jeff Carpenter, who Google now employs as a machine learning developer, will be taking over as the team lead for Keras.

Chollet added in his essay, “I have full confidence in Jeff and the incredibly talented Keras team to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible in deep learning even though they are extremely talented.” From a distance, I intend to maintain a significant level of involvement with the Keras project.