A Visionary in Artificial Intelligence
François Chollet (born October 20, 1989) is a French software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher, formerly a 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 and abstraction, and achieving greater generality in artificial intelligence.
In 2012, Chollet graduated with a Diplôme d'Ingénieur (Master of Engineering) from ENSTA Paris, a school of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris.
In 2015, Chollet started working at Google shortly after releasing Keras. In 2019, he published the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC-AGI) benchmark to evaluate AI systems' ability to solve novel reasoning problems.
In 2024, Chollet launched the ARC Prize, a $1 million competition to solve the ARC-AGI benchmark. He left Google in November 2024 after over 9 years with the company.
Chollet's research papers in AI have been published at major conferences, including CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICLR. He is the author of Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions, one of the top ten most cited papers in CVPR proceedings with over 18,000 citations.
He authored the book Deep Learning with Python, which sold over 100,000 copies, and co-authored Deep Learning with R with Joseph J. Allaire.
On December 1, 2021, Chollet won the Global Swiss AI Award for breakthroughs in AI. In September 2024, he was named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in AI.