François Chollet is Co-Founder of ARC Prize Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to guiding researchers towards artificial general intelligence through enduring AI benchmarks. He is also Co-Founder of Ndea, an AGI-focused AI research lab.

François created Keras in 2015, the widely adopted open-source deep learning library used by over 2.5 million developers, and served as Senior Staff Engineer at Google for nearly a decade until November 2024. He authored the bestselling book Deep Learning with Python, which has sold over 100,000 copies.

François introduced the ARC-AGI benchmark in his influential 2019 paper On the Measure of Intelligence, establishing the only benchmark measuring progress toward general intelligence. His Xception paper is among the top ten most cited papers in CVPR proceedings with over 18,000 citations.

In 2024, François co-founded ARC Prize with Mike Knoop, launching a $1 million competition that attracted over 1,400 teams and awarded more than $125,000 in prizes. The foundation expanded into a full nonprofit in early 2025 to accelerate AGI research and establish industry standards.

Keras has been adopted by major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon as their high-level deep learning API. The ARC-AGI benchmark has been used by leading AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to evaluate their frontier AI systems.