Keras inventor Chollet charts a new direction for AI: a Q&A ZDNet

"A lot of well-funded, large-scale gradient-descent projects get carried out as a way to generate bombastic press articles that misleadingly suggest that human-level AI is perhaps a few years away," says Google scientist François Chollet. "Many people have staked a lot on this illusion. François Chollet, a scientist in Google's artificial intelligence unit, is a member of a new generation of pioneers in machine learning. In 2015, he introduced the world to an application programming interface that has become wildly popular for implementing deep learning networks, called Keras. It is most commonly used as an interface to Google's TensorFlow framework. In that way, Chollet has helped in very concrete fashion to advance the development and testing of deep learning. It may seem surprising, then, that one of Chollet's foci at the moment is the very big picture of how to advance artificial intelligence beyond merely getting better on benchmarks. Chollet is not entirely satisfied with where AI is at the moment. "A lot of well-funded, large-scale gradient-descent projects get carried out as a way to generate bombastic press articles that misleadingly suggest that human-level AI is perhaps a few years away," wrote Chollet in a communication with ZDNet in email. "Many people have staked a lot on this illusion.