François Chollet created the Keras deep learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark for measuring general intelligence. He left Google in late 2024 after more than nine years and co-founded Ndea, an AI lab pursuing AGI through deep-learning-guided program synthesis, with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop. He also co-founded and serves on the board of the ARC Prize Foundation, a nonprofit that runs the ARC-AGI benchmark and prize. Ndea is his current primary venture.
Recent
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2026-08-09 Posted two threads on X updating his views on LRMs: (1) after o3’s test-time compute demo in late 2024 he changed his position – “the new models were showing genuine fluid intelligence”; (2) base LLMs (no test-time compute) still perform poorly on ARC-1 from 2019 despite ~100,000x scaling since then. Still does not believe 2040-era AI will be LLM-based; expects a move toward symbolic learning. X post · X post
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2026-07-12 Tweeted that AI code gen has fully flipped: weak AI code gen raised the floor for low-skill programmers but was useless to high-skill ones; strong AI code gen is now most useful to high-skill programmers — “it went from a crutch to a power tool.” X