AI Pioneer François Chollet Launches Ndea: A New Path to AGI

François Chollet, a well-known figure in the AI world, is starting a new venture called Ndea. This isn't just any startup; it's a research lab with a big goal: to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI is like having AI that can do anything a human can. It's a dream for many AI companies, including OpenAI. Chollet believes there's a different way to make AI that can truly invent, adapt, and innovate. He's betting on a method called program synthesis. This technique lets AI figure out new problems it hasn't seen before, just from a few examples. Chollet thinks this could be the key to overcoming some of the toughest challenges in AI. Ndea plans to use program synthesis along with other methods to unlock AGI. While this technique is usually quite demanding on computers, Chollet thinks there's a way to overcome this. He believes this breakthrough could speed up scientific progress. Chollet is co-founding Ndea with Mike Knoop, who co-founded Zapier and is now focusing on Ndea. They're already hiring for remote research positions, which means they have some financial support. Chollet is no stranger to big projects. He's known for creating Keras, a popular tool for building AI models. He recently left Google after almost a decade to start this new journey. Other big names in AI have also started their own labs. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder of OpenAI, started Safe Superintelligence. Fei-Fei Li, a longtime Google AI researcher, is now heading World Labs.