Francois Chollet—an AI pioneer and the creator of Keras—is leaving Google, the latest in a string of AI pioneers to leave the company.
Keras is a Python deep learning API that bills itself as “a superpower for developers.”
The purpose of Keras is to give an unfair advantage to any developer looking to ship Machine Learning-powered apps. Keras focuses on debugging speed, code elegance & conciseness, maintainability, and deployability. When you choose Keras, your codebase is smaller, more readable, easier to iterate on. Your models run faster thanks to XLA compilation with JAX and TensorFlow, and are easier to deploy across every surface (server, mobile, browser, embedded) thanks to the serving components from the TensorFlow and PyTorch ecosystems, such as TF Serving, TorchServe, TF Lite, TF.js, and more.
According to a blog post by Bill Jia, VP of Engineering for Core ML, and Xavi Amatriain, VP of ACE (AI and Compute Enablement) said Chollet is leaving the company.
Today, we’re announcing that Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras and a leading figure in the AI world, is embarking on a new chapter in his career outside of Google. While we are sad to see him go, we are incredibly proud of his immense contributions and excited to see what he accomplishes next.
With over two million users, Keras has become a cornerstone of AI development, streamlining complex workflows and democratizing access to cutting-edge technology. It powers numerous applications at Google and across the world, from the Waymo autonomous cars, to your daily YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify recommendations.
The two executives say Chollet remains committed to contributing to Keras, while Google will continue to invest in it.
Importantly, Francois remains deeply committed to the future of Keras and its continued support for JAX, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. He will continue contributing to the project and overseeing its roadmap. The Keras team at Google will continue to collaborate with Francois in the open-source community, and wish him all the best in his future endeavors.
Google’s continued investment in Keras 3 demonstrates our commitment to support major ML frameworks and offer ML developers framework optionality. Our recent launch of Keras Hub is also a significant step towards democratizing access to powerful AI tools and accelerating the development of innovative multimodal applications.
Google has lost a number of high-profile AI researchers and pioneers in the last couple of years, a trend it needs to address if it is to remain competitive.