New Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Research Laboratory Founded by Renowned AI Expert François Chollet

AI researcher François Chollet founds a new AI lab focused on AGI

François Chollet, a prominent AI researcher and creator of the popular deep learning framework Keras, has announced the founding of a new AI laboratory dedicated to developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). This bold move marks a significant departure from his previous role at Google.

Ndea, the name of this new initiative, aims to “develop and operationalize” AGI, a goal that few researchers have been able to achieve. Chollet is co-founding Ndea with Zapier co-founder and head of AI Mike Knoop, who will also remain on the board of his previous venture.

In a series of posts on X, Chollet explained his motivations behind this new endeavor, stating that he believes Ndea has a “small but real chance” of achieving a breakthrough in AGI. He plans to achieve this by utilizing program synthesis techniques, alongside other cutting-edge approaches.

Chollet emphasizes the immense potential of this technology, saying that it would allow AI systems to learn at least as efficiently as humans and adapt to new situations without human intervention. This could lead to significant advancements in various industries and aspects of society.

The creation of Ndea is notable not only due to Chollet’s stature within the AI community but also because it adds another prominent researcher to the growing list of those leaving big tech companies to found their own independent labs.

This development follows closely on the heels of Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist and co-founder, who established Safe Superintelligence last year. Another notable figure in this space is Fei-Fei Li, a longtime Google AI researcher and Stanford academic, who is currently leading World Labs.

Chollet’s decision to leave Google marks the end of his nearly decade-long tenure at the company.

Source: techcrunch.com