François Chollet Launches Ndea: A New Frontier in AGI Research

ARC-AGI Benchmark Creator François Chollet Launches his AGI Lab 'Ndea'

AGI refers to AI systems capable of performing a broad range of tasks at human-level ability, a goal many organisations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and others, are striving to achieve. Ndea focuses on program synthesis. It is positioning itself as a pioneer in the pursuit of AGI by combining program synthesis with advanced deep-learning techniques. The lab is currently hiring remote researchers to assemble a world-class team. In a recent post on X, Chollet explained the lab's vision, "I've been talking about some of these ideas, merging 'System 1' deep learning with 'System 2' program search, on-the-fly knowledge recombination in the face of new tasks, lifelong learning, autonomous abstraction generation since 2017. While I was at Google, this type of research was a side project." Chollet announced his exit from Google last year, where he said he would continue to advise the company. Last month, during OpenAI's '12 days of shipmas', the company soft-announced AGI through the introduction of the next-generation frontier models o3 and o3 Mini. These models achieved state-of-the-art performance, nearing 90%, on the ARC-AGI benchmark, surpassing human performance. Chollet disregarded this claim as premature. The ARC team even announced a newer and upgraded evaluation (ARC-AGI benchmark 2). Alongside Chollet, Knoop, who is stepping back from his daily role at Zapier to focus on Ndea, emphasised the lab's ambitious mission. "Creating AGI is a pivotal moment in human history. Many have ideas about how, including us. But it doesn't exist yet! Until we achieve AGI, we need to create the strongest possible environment for innovation. The world deserves every shot at making it happen," he shared on X.

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

François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a new startup that aims to build frontier AI systems with novel designs. The startup, Ndea, will consist of an AI research and science lab, and seek to "develop and operationalize" AGI. AGI, which stands for "artificial general intelligence," typically refers to AI that can perform any task a human can. It's a goalpost for many AI companies, including OpenAI. "We're betting on a different path to build AI capable of true invention, adaptation, and innovation," Chollet wrote in a series of posts on X. "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." Ndea plans to use a technique called program synthesis, in tandem with other technical approaches, to unlock AGI. Chollet believes that program synthesis, which allows AI to generalize to problems it hasn't seen before from only a few examples, can help to overcome the most intractable problems in AI research. Program synthesis is traditionally computing-intensive. But Chollet believes this limitation can be overcome -- and that overcoming it will help accelerate scientific progress. "[W]e are not alone in recognizing the potential of program synthesis -- it's a technique every frontier AI lab is now starting to explore," reads a blog post on Ndea's website. "We are at the crest of a pivotal moment in scientific history and the world deserves every possible direct, unique attempt to build AGI." Ndea, which Chollet is co-founding with Zapier co-founder and head of AI Mike Knoop, hasn't disclosed whether it has raised any capital from outside investors. But the company is currently hiring for remote research positions, suggesting that there's at least some financial backing. Knoop says that he's stepping away from his day-to-day work at Zapier to make Ndea his focus, but that he'll remain a member of Zapier's board. "We're assembling the world's top program synthesis team," Knoop said in a post on X. "Our first focus is on deep learning-guided program synthesis to create AGI that can invent, adapt, and innovate ... But even more exciting is the chance to metaphorically time-travel into the future: learn, invent, and discover things that would not organically happen for decades or even centuries." Chollet, who recently launched a nonprofit with Knoop to develop benchmarks for AGI, is the latest high-profile AI researcher to leave big tech to found an independent AI lab. Perhaps best known as the creator of Keras, a high-level, open source API that can be used to create AI models and tackle machine learning tasks, Chollet announced last November that he would depart Google after close to a decade there. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist and co-founder, last year founded Safe Superintelligence, an AI lab that has raised over $1 billion in capital from investors including Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. Elsewhere, longtime Google AI researcher and Stanford academic Fei-Fei Li is heading World Labs, a company developing AI systems that can generate video game-like 3D simulations.

Forget Nvidia: Ndea wants to build AI that keeps improving on its own with 'no bottlenecks in sight'

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More François Chollet, a former Google engineer and the creator of the widely used Python deep learning framework Keras, has co-founded Ndea, a new AI research and science lab, alongside Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier. In a post on the startup's new website, the founders explain their goals of combining intuitive pattern recognition, enabled by deep learning, with formal reasoning through what they call "guided program synthesis." According to them, this fusion will allow AI systems to adapt and innovate far beyond current task-specific applications, ultimately leading to artificial general intelligence (AGI), defined loosely throughout the AI community as machine intelligence that can outperform human beings at most economically valuable and cognitive tasks. As they write: "We need computers that can pose problems and explore new territory, not just apply known solutions. We need computers that can innovate. The path to AGI is not through incremental improvements to existing methods." The duo hasn't stated yet whether or not they've received outside funding for this venture or are bootstrapping it with their own funds. It comes several months of after former OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, reported to have led the briefly successful yet ultimately reversed internal coup against his fellow co-founder, Sam Altman, also announced a startup focused on developing "Safe Superintelligence" with $1 billion in private backing. Beyond deep learning While existing deep learning systems are impressive, Chollet and Knoop argue they are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on large datasets and their inability to adapt efficiently to new tasks. Chollet and Knoop believe that program synthesis is the key to overcoming these limitations. Unlike traditional deep learning, which interpolates between data points, program synthesis searches for discrete programs that explain data. This method allows for much greater generalization with far fewer data points. Combining deep learning's intuitive capabilities with the rigorous reasoning of program synthesis could lead to a new paradigm for AI research. "Ndea's mission is to operationalize AGI to realize unprecedented scientific progress for the benefit of all current and future generations," they note. Building a "Factory for Scientific Advancement" Ndea's long-term vision goes beyond the creation of AGI. The lab aims to act as a "factory for rapid scientific advancement," capable of solving both known and unknown challenges. From tackling current frontiers like autonomous vehicles and sustainable energy to accelerating entirely new discoveries, the lab sees itself as a catalyst for scientific progress. Chollet added that their research direction has the potential to unlock breakthroughs and redefine the boundaries of human knowledge. As he wrote in a thread on X: "If we're successful, we won't stop at AI. With this technology in hand, we want to tackle every scientific problem it can solve. We see accelerating scientific progress as the most exciting application of AI." According to Chollet, this progress hinges on developing AI that can learn as efficiently as humans and continue to improve over time without bottlenecks. While acknowledging that success is not guaranteed, Chollet emphasized the importance of pursuing this ambitious goal, stating on X: "We believe we have a small but real chance of achieving a breakthrough -- creating AI that can keep improving over time with no bottlenecks in sight." A New Research Focus for AGI Program synthesis, the cornerstone of Ndea's research, is still a relatively young field. Chollet likened its current state to where deep learning was in 2012. However, he noted that its potential is being increasingly recognized by frontier AI labs, even if most see it as only a small component of what's needed for AGI. Ndea, in contrast, considers program synthesis equally as important as deep learning and has made it central to their approach. The lab is also actively recruiting a globally distributed team of researchers and engineers to build what it describes as the most "talent-dense program synthesis team" in the world. The company operates as a fully remote organization and is looking for candidates with strong technical expertise, particularly in translating mathematical concepts into code. Founders with strong track records François Chollet and Mike Knoop bring extensive experience to Ndea. At Google, Chollet worked on core research into deep learning and AI systems, gaining insights into the limitations of existing models and opportunities for improvement. His contributions include not only Keras but also the ARC-AGI benchmark, a widely used metric for measuring progress toward AGI. He is also the author of the book Deep Learning with Python and has been recognized among Time's "100 Most Influential People in AI." Knoop co-founded Zapier, the world's largest AI automation company, where he led engineering and product development as well as the company's early adoption of AI technologies. He is also credited with pioneering best practices for globally distributed teams. Both Chollet and Knoop are co-founders of the ARC Prize Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on advancing open AGI research. Future visions rooted in ancient tradition Ndea derives its name from the Greek concepts ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), reflecting the lab's goal of merging deep learning and program synthesis. By operationalizing AGI, Ndea hopes to compress centuries of scientific progress into decades or even years. While acknowledging the uncertainty and challenges of pursuing AGI, Chollet and Knoop remain optimistic about their approach. They see AGI as the gateway to addressing humanity's most pressing challenges and uncovering entirely new opportunities for discovery.

François Chollet reveals he's leading a new startup that aims to make AGI a reality - SiliconANGLE

François Chollet reveals he's leading a new startup that aims to make AGI a reality The respected artificial intelligence research 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. 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 is the ideal approach as 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 still 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 raise 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 being 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" that are able to simulate virtual worlds along with realistic animations and physics.