François Chollet

François Chollet
François Chollet (age 30; 2020)
Born	(1989-10-20) October 20, 1989 (age 35)[1]
Nationality	French
Education	ENSTA Paris (MEng)
Years active	2012–present
Engineering career
Discipline	Artificial Intelligence
Employer(s)	Google (2015-2024)
Projects	Keras, TensorFlow, ARC Prize
Awards	TIME100 AI, Global Swiss AI Award
Website	fchollet.com

François Chollet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa ʃoˈlɛ]; born 20 October 1989) is a French software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher formerly Senior Staff Engineer at Google. Chollet is the creator of the Keras deep-learning library, released in 2015. His research focuses on computer vision, the application of machine learning to formal reasoning, abstraction,[2] and how to achieve greater generality in artificial intelligence.[3]

Education and career

In 2012, Chollet graduated with a Diplôme d'Ingénieur (Master of Engineering) from ENSTA Paris, a school of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris.[4]

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.[5]

In 2024, Chollet launched ARC Prize, a US$1 million competition to solve the ARC-AGI benchmark.[6] He left Google in November 2024 after more than 9 years with the company.[7]

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.[8]

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).[9]

Chollet is the author of Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions,[10] which is among the top ten most cited papers in CVPR proceedings at more than 18,000 citations.[11]

Chollet is the author of the book Deep Learning with Python,[12] 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.[13][14]

In September 2024, Chollet was named by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people in AI.[15]

Bibliography

• Chollet, François (2017). Deep Learning with Python. Manning Publications. ISBN 9781617294433.
• Chollet, François; Allaire, J. J. (2018). Deep Learning With R. Manning Publications. ISBN 9781617295546.
• Chollet, François (2019). On the Measure of Intelligence. arXiv:1911.01547.
• Chollet, François (2021). Deep Learning with Python Second Edition. Manning Publications. ISBN 9781617296864.

References

1. Chollet.
2. Chollet, Francois. "Google Cloud BrandVoice: Deep Learning Q&A: What's Coming Next With Francois Chollet". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-08-02.
3. "To Really Judge an AI's Smarts, Give it One of These IQ Tests". IEEE Spectrum. 2021-02-02. Retrieved 2021-08-02.
4. "EAUX D'ICI, EAUX DE LÀ : c'est fini..." concours-nouvelles.ensta-paris.fr. Archived from the original on 2021-10-16. Retrieved 2021-07-29.
5. "Abstraction and Reasoning Challenge". kaggle.com. Retrieved 2021-07-29.
6. "ARC Prize". arcprize.org. 2024-09-14. Retrieved 2024-09-14.
7. "Farewell and thank you for the continued partnership, Francois Chollet!- Google Developers Blog". developers.googleblog.com. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
8. "ARC Prize Foundation - a North Star for AGI". arcprize.org. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
9. Ray, Tiernan. "A quick tour of what you missed at the NeurIPS 2020 AI conference". ZDNet. Retrieved 2021-08-02.
10. "Xception: Deep Learning With Depthwise Separable Convolutions". CVPR 2017. Retrieved 2021-11-07.
11. "Google Scholar: top 100 CVPR publications". Google Scholar. Retrieved 2021-11-07.
12. "Top Deep Learning Books to Read in 2021". Programming Insider. 2021-04-27. Retrieved 2021-08-02.
13. "François Chollet, Google: "On aura bientôt entraîné les modèles sur tous les textes humainement disponibles"". ICTJournal. Retrieved 2022-02-15.
14. "Wie man künstliche Intelligenz messen kann - und warum das wichtig ist". Netzwoche. 25 November 2021. Retrieved 2022-02-15.
15. "TIME100 AI 2024: Francois Chollet". time.com. 2024-09-14. Retrieved 2024-09-14.