François Chollet (; born 20 October 1989) is a French

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

researcher formerly Senior Staff Engineer at

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. Chollet is the creator of the

Keras Keras is an open-source library that provides a Python interface for artificial neural networks. Keras was first independent software, then integrated into the TensorFlow library, and later added support for more. "Keras 3 is a full rewrite o ...

deep-learning library, released in 2015. His research focuses on

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

, the application of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

to formal reasoning,

abstraction Abstraction is a process where general rules and concepts are derived from the use and classifying of specific examples, literal (reality, real or Abstract and concrete, concrete) signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An abstraction" ...

, and how to achieve greater generality in artificial intelligence (AGI).

Education and career

In 2012, Chollet graduated with a ''

Diplôme d'Ingénieur The ''Diplôme d'Ingénieur'' (, often abbreviated as ''Dipl.Ing.'') is a postgraduate degree in engineering ''(see Engineer's Degrees in Europe)'' usually awarded by the '' Grandes Écoles'' in engineering. It is generally obtained after five to ...

'' (

Master of Engineering A Master of Engineering (abbreviated MEng, ME, M.E. or M.Eng.) is a Professional degree, professional master's degree in the field of engineering. International variations Australia In Australia, the Master of Engineering degree is a research ...

) from ENSTA Paris, a school of the

Polytechnic Institute of Paris The Polytechnic Institute of Paris () is a Public university, public technological university located in Palaiseau, France. It consists of six engineering ''grandes écoles'': , ENSTA Paris, ENSAE Paris, École des ponts ParisTech, Télécom Paris ...

. In 2015, Chollet started working at Google shortly after releasing Keras. In 2019, he 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. In 2024, Chollet launched ARC Prize, a US$1 million competition to solve the ARC-AGI benchmark. He left Google in November 2024 after more than 9 years with the company to found with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop a new startup focused on developing AGI with

program synthesis In computer science, program synthesis is the task to construct a computer program, program that provably correct, provably satisfies a given high-level formal specification. In contrast to program verification, the program is to be constructed rat ...

. In early 2025, Chollet announced the expansion of ARC Prize into a full-fledged non-profit foundation, to further the mission of guiding and accelerating research progress towards

artificial general intelligence Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sometimes called human‑level intelligence AI—is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Some researchers argue that sta ...

Books and publications

Chollet's research papers in artificial intelligence have been published at major conferences in the field, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Chollet is the author of ''Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions'', which is among the top ten most cited papers in CVPR proceedings at more than 18,000 citations. Chollet is the author of the book ''Deep Learning with Python'', which sold over 100,000 copies, and the co-author with Joseph J. Allaire of ''Deep Learning With R.''

Awards

On December 1, 2021, Chollet won the Global Swiss AI Award for breakthroughs in AI. In September 2024, Chollet was named by ''

TIME Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

'' as one of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Bibliography

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chollet, François French computer scientists Artificial intelligence researchers Google employees Living people Machine learning researchers 1989 births