François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a brand new startup that goals to construct frontier AI techniques with novel designs.
The startup, Ndea, will encompass an AI analysis and science lab. It’s trying to “develop and operationalize” AGI. AGI, which stands for “artificial general intelligence,” sometimes refers to AI that may carry out any activity a human can. It’s a goalpost for a lot of AI corporations, together with OpenAI.
“We’re betting on a different path to build AI capable of true invention, adaptation, and innovation,” Chollet wrote in a collection 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 make use of a method known as program synthesis, in tandem with different technical approaches, to unlock AGI. Chollet thinks that program synthesis, which permits AI to generalize issues it hasn’t seen earlier than from just a few examples, can assist to beat essentially the most intractable issues in AI analysis.
Program synthesis is historically computing-intensive. However Chollet thinks this limitation could be overcome — and that overcoming it should assist speed up 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 weblog publish on Ndea’s web site. “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 or not it has raised any capital from outdoors buyers. However the firm is at present hiring for distant analysis positions, suggesting that there’s a minimum of some monetary backing.
It’s not on a regular basis that you just see people of the calibre of @fchollet and @mikeknoop resolve to begin an organization! I’m excited to be concerned as a supporter, however importantly, their imaginative and prescient for the best way to remedy the arduous issues in AI is superior. Our area is dominated by hype and hope -… https://t.co/7u6OT1vrHc
— Naveen Rao (@NaveenGRao) January 15, 2025
Knoop says that he’s stepping away from his day-to-day work at Zapier to make Ndea his focus, however that he’ll stay a member of Zapier’s board.
“We’re assembling the world’s top program synthesis team,” Knoop mentioned in a publish 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 not too long ago launched a nonprofit with Knoop to develop benchmarks for AGI, is the newest high-profile AI researcher to go away Huge Tech to discovered an unbiased AI lab. Maybe finest often known as the creator of Keras, a high-level, open supply API that can be utilized to create AI fashions and deal with machine studying duties, Chollet introduced final November that he would depart Google after near a decade there.
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist and co-founder, final 12 months based Protected Superintelligence, an AI lab that has raised over $1 billion in capital from buyers together with Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. Elsewhere, longtime Google AI researcher and Stanford educational Fei-Fei Li is heading World Labs, an organization growing AI techniques that may generate video game-like 3D simulations.
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