creators

François Chollet - Keras, ARC-AGI and Ndea

François Chollet created Keras and the ARC-AGI benchmark, left Google in 2024 to co-found the AGI lab Ndea, and co-founded the ARC Prize Foundation.

François Chollet is a French software engineer and AI researcher who created Keras, the deep learning API released in March 2015 and now in its third generation, which runs on JAX, TensorFlow or PyTorch. He left Google in November 2024, after more than nine years, to co-found the AI lab Ndea with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop; Ndea works on deep-learning-guided program synthesis and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch. He introduced the ARC-AGI benchmark in 2019 and co-founded the ARC Prize Foundation, the non-profit that runs the competition, whose 2026 edition carries more than $2 million in prizes.

Specialization

deep learning frameworks, AI benchmarks, program synthesis, AGI research