François Chollet on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.
François Chollet is a leading voice in AI. He’s the creator of the Keras library, author of Deep Learning with Python, and the founder of the ARC Prize, a global competition aimed at measuring true general intelligence.
He’s spent years thinking deeply about what intelligence actually is, and why scaling up today’s AI models isn’t enough to reach it.
In this talk, he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized skills, and lays out a path toward true general intelligence— AI that can adapt on the fly, reason in new situations, and invent novel solutions. He explains why abstraction and compositionality matter, how ARC became the benchmark for progress, and what his team at a new research lab called Ndea is building next.
Chapters:
00:00 – The Falling Cost of Compute
00:57 – Deep-Learning’s Scaling Era & Benchmarks
01:59 – The ARC Benchmark
03:02 – The 2024 Shift to Test-Time Adaptation
05:01 – What Is Intelligence?
07:12 – Why Benchmarks Matter (and Mislead)
08:57 – ARC 1 Exposes Scaling Limits
10:58 – ARC 2: Compositional Reasoning Arrives
12:55 – Humans vs. Models on ARC 2
14:58 – Previewing ARC 3 & Interactive Agency
17:00 – Kaleidoscopic Hypothesis and Abstractions
22:00 – Type 1 vs. Type 2 Abstractions
26:00 – Discrete Program Search & Inventive AI
29:00 – Fusing Intuition with Symbolic Reasoning
32:00 – Building AGI Through Meta-Learning Systems
