François Cholet, a leading figure in the world of AI, is leaving Google after nearly a decade.
In a post on X, Chollet said he was starting a new company with a “friend” but did not provide further details.
“I am very grateful for my 10 years at Google,” he said. “During that period, deep learning has grown from a niche academic topic to a large-scale industry employing millions of people.”
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 solve machine learning problems. According to a post on Google's developer blog, Keras has more than 2 million users and powers numerous high-profile technology products, from Waymo's self-driving cars to YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify's recommendation engines. It is said that it supports
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 contest to solve ARC-AGI. (Still undefeated.)
In 2021, Chollet received the Global Swiss AI Award for groundbreaking advances in AI. And in September, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in AI.
Chollet said that Jeff Carpenter, a machine learning engineer at Google, will be the team leader for Keras.
“I have full confidence in Jeff and the incredibly talented Keras team to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible with deep learning,” Chollet wrote in the post. “I will continue to be heavily involved in the Keras project from the outside.”