Often presented, rightly, as one of the great pioneers of artificial intelligence, François Chollet is leaving Google after ten years of good and loyal service. Here is what to remember from the announcement of this figure at the origin of a very innovative project which changed the world of Tech.
A new entrepreneurial project
It was therefore on X (formerly Twitter) that the engineer spoke on November 14 to announce the news:
I’m leaving Google to start a new company with a friend. More information will be announced soon! (…) I am very grateful for my decade at Google (…) During this period, deep learning has grown from a niche academic subject to a powerful industry employing millions of people.
He is best known for the Keras project which he intends to continue to follow from outside, in particular by contributing to GitHub. And for all those who are not really familiar with this initiative, François Chollet details the implications of this innovation in our daily lives:
Keras has grown from a small library used by a few thousand enthusiasts to a cutting-edge framework used by 2 million developers. Today, Keras powers solutions in countless businesses and touches people’s lives around the world. You interact with Keras models constantly: they make recommendations on YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify, filter fraud on your credit card transactions, and drive Waymo cars to San Francisco.
What about the AI of the future?
As rightly pointed out TechCrunchthis specialist believes that the current approach to AI based on the accumulation of data and computing resources to power models will not be able to create technology as “intelligent” as humans. He believes that new methods, such as neuro-symbolic AI, which attempts to teach models to “reason” like humans, are more promising.
While waiting to learn more about his business project, François Chollet sends a message full of optimism to his former colleagues: “Jeff Carpenter takes the helm of the Keras team and I couldn’t have asked for a better successor. I have every confidence in Jeff and the incredibly talented team at Keras to continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in deep learning.”
