Francois Chollet
AI researcher, creator of the Keras library and co-founder of the ARC Prize.
Francois Chollet is a French software engineer and researcher best known for building Keras, the library that made training neural networks approachable for people who were not specialists, and for a long stint at Google. He left in 2024 to work on his own ideas about what intelligence actually is.
He is now most visible through the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, which grew out of his argument that intelligence should be measured as the ability to handle genuinely new problems rather than the ability to recall a lot. He is a persistent public sceptic of the claim that scaling models up will produce general intelligence on its own, which puts him in regular and fairly civil disagreement with the large labs.