François Chollet reveals he’s leading a new startup that aims to make AGI a reality

The respected artificial intelligence researcher François Chollet, who recently departed from Google LLC, has revealed in a series of posts on X that he’s launching a new startup focused on “artificial general intelligence.”

In one of his posts he explained that Ndea hopes to “develop and operationalize” AGI, which is a term used to describe more advanced AI systems that can perform any task just as well as a human can. True AGI doesn’t yet exist, but a lot of AI researchers believe it’s an achievable goal, and Chollet is hoping he’ll be one of the first to get there.

We’re really excited about our current research direction. We believe we have a small but real chance of achieving a breakthrough — creating AI that can learn at least as efficiently as people, and that can keep improving over time with no bottlenecks in sight.

— François Chollet (@fchollet) January 15, 2025

Chollet explained on X that Ndea will use “program synthesis” techniques in conjunction with a few other approaches to try and develop its AGI system. According to the researcher, it’s the ideal approach because it allows systems to generalize problems they haven’t seen before using only a few examples.

One challenge Chollet will have to overcome is that program synthesis is a very compute-intensive technique, but he believes he has found a way to get around this obstacle. He added that “every frontier AI lab” is currently exploring the technique and that progress will be made.

“We are at the crest of a pivotal moment in scientific history and the world deserves every possible direct, unique attempt to build AGI,” he said.

Chollet, who is best known as the creator of Keras, a high-level, open source API that can be used to integrate AI capabilities into traditional applications, is founding Ndea alongside another well-known AI researcher called Mike Knoop, who previously co-founded Zapier Inc.

Knoop said on X that he’s stepping down from his role of head of AI at Zapier to focus on Ndea, though he will remain a member of the older company’s board of directors.

It’s not clear if Ndea has raised any capital thus far, but the startup is looking to hire a team of employees, and has listed jobs for a number of remote research positions.

According to Knoop, Ndea wants to assemble “the world’s top program synthesis team.” When it does, it will first focus on “deep learning-guided program synthesis,” with the goal to build an AGI system that’s able to “invent, adapt and innovate” in an autonomous way.

Knoop said the most exciting thing about AGI is the prospect of being able to “metaphorically time-travel into the future and learn, invent, and discover things that would not organically happen for decades or even centuries.”

Chollet and Knoop are just the latest AI researchers to have quit the big technology companies that first made them famous. Last year, OpenAI’s former co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left that company to found a startup called Safe Superintelligence Inc., which aims to build a new generation of “superintelligent” AI models that will probably be close to achieving AGI.

In addition, Fei-Fei Li, who was formerly a colleague of Chollet at Google, left that company to help found a startup called World Labs Technologies Inc., which is developing “world models” to simulate virtual worlds along with realistic animations and physics.

Photo: François Chollet/X