François Chollet, an influential artificial intelligence researcher, is launching a new startup aimed at building cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems with novel designs.

The startup Ndea will consist of an artificial intelligence research and science laboratory. It is seeking to "develop and implement" general artificial intelligence. AGI stands for "Artificial General Intelligence" and generally refers to artificial intelligence that can perform any task that a human can perform. This is the goal of many artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI.

Chollet wrote in a series of posts on Create artificial intelligence. “It can learn at least as efficiently as humans and can improve over time without bottlenecks. "

Ndea plans to use a technique called procedural synthesis, combined with other technical approaches, to unlock AGI. Chollet believes that program synthesis can help overcome the toughest problems in artificial intelligence research by allowing AI to generalize from a few examples to problems it has never seen before.

Program synthesis has traditionally been computationally intensive. But Cholet believes this limitation is surmountable—and that overcoming it would help accelerate scientific progress.

"(We) are not alone in recognizing the potential of program synthesis, a technology that every cutting-edge AI lab is now beginning to explore," a blog post on Ndea's website reads. "We are at a point where The culmination of a critical moment in the history of science, the world deserves every possible direct, unique attempt to build general artificial intelligence.”

Ndea, a company Chollet co-founded with Zapier co-founder and head of AI Mike Knoop, has not disclosed whether it has raised any funding from outside investors. But the company is currently hiring for remote research positions, suggesting at least some financial support.

Knoop said he will take a break from his day job at Zapier to focus on Ndea, but he will remain a member of Zapier's board of directors.

"We are building the world's top program integration team," Knoop said in an article on X . “Our primary focus is on deep learning-guided synthesis of programs to create AGIs capable of inventing, adapting, and innovating… But even more exciting is the opportunity to metaphorically time travel into the future: learning, inventing, and discovering decades or even decades into the future. Something that won’t happen in a century.”

Chollet, who recently co-founded a nonprofit with Knoop to develop benchmarks for AGI, is the latest high-profile AI researcher to leave a major tech company to create an independent AI lab. Chollet is perhaps best known as the creator of Keras, a high-level open source API for creating AI models and handling machine learning tasks. Chollet announced in November that he was leaving Google after nearly a decade at the company.

Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, last year founded Safe Superintelligence, an artificial intelligence lab that has raised more than $1 billion in funding from investors including Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Elsewhere, longtime Google AI researcher and Stanford scholar Fei-Fei Li is leading World Labs, a company developing artificial intelligence systems that can generate video game-like 3D simulations.