AI researcher François Chollet leaves Google, Keras stays
François Chollet, AI researcher and influential developer of the Keras AI framework, is leaving Google after a decade to start his own company.
With more than two million users, his Keras framework has become a cornerstone of AI development and powers numerous critical applications.
The technology runs in recommendation systems for YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify, fraud detection for credit card transactions, and Waymo's self-driving cars. Chollet will maintain close ties to the open-source Keras project after his departure and continue to shape its development from the outside.
Jeff Carpenter, whom Chollet himself describes as an ideal successor, will take over leadership of the Keras team at Google. In a blog post, Google reaffirmed its commitment to the framework, particularly focusing on developing the new Keras 3 version, which is compatible with JAX, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. With the recently launched Keras Hub, Google also aims to further simplify access to AI tools.
Looking beyond language models
During his time at Google, Chollet says he witnessed deep learning evolve from an academic niche into an industry employing millions. He plans to announce details about his new company soon. The AI researcher is also behind the challenging ARC benchmark and its associated ARC prize, which currently offers $1 million to redirect AI development away from pure language models and back toward general AI development. The ARC benchmark tasks are easy for humans to solve and require no special knowledge. However, modern AI systems struggle with these tasks because they're designed to resist solutions through memorization.
Similar to deep learning critic Gary Marcus and Meta's AI chief Yann LeCun, Chollet sees current LLMs as only part of the solution. Recently, some methods have approached average human performance on the ARC prize, but the gap to top human performance remains significant.
AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans
As a THE DECODER subscriber, you get ad-free reading, our weekly AI newsletter, the exclusive "AI Radar" Frontier Report 6× per year, access to comments, and our complete archive.
Subscribe nowAI news without the hype
Curated by humans.
- Over 20 percent launch discount.
- Read without distractions – no Google ads.
- Access to comments and community discussions.
- Weekly AI newsletter.
- 6 times a year: “AI Radar” – deep dives on key AI topics.
- Up to 25 % off on KI Pro online events.
- Access to our full ten-year archive.
- Get the latest AI news from The Decoder.