François Chollet, creator of Keras and founder of NDEA, discusses why alternative foundational AI architectures are needed beyond large language models.
“I personally don't think that machine learning or AI in 50 years is still going to be built on this stack.”
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More from François Chollet
PredictionOpen · timeframe Mar 2031
Chollet: AGI Codebase Will Be Under 10,000 Lines on 1980s Compute
“I do believe that, you know, when you create a GI retrospectively, it will turn out that it's a code base that's less than 10,000 lines of code. And that if you had known about it back in the 19 eighties, you could have done a GI back then using the computer r…”
François CholletMar 27, 2026▶ 36:09François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI · Y Combinator
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Chollet: Symbolic Models Will Eventually Replicate and Outperform Deep Learning
“And so everything you're doing with machine learning today, with parametric curves, we should be able to do it. With symbolic models in the future in a way that will be much, much closer to optimality. Much closer to optimality in the sense that you're going t…”
François CholletMar 27, 2026▶ 3:42François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI · Y Combinator
Insight
Chollet: Gradient Descent Fails at Reasoning by Defaulting to Pattern Matching
“You could not really get Gradient descent to encode sort of like reasoning style algorithms. It was not because the models could not represent these algorithms. It was because gradient descent could not find them, right? So the problem was that it wasn't about…”
François CholletMar 27, 2026▶ 14:11François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI · Y Combinator
Opinion
Chollet: AI field is obsessed with idea that scale alone yields AGI
“Our field became obsessed with the idea that general intelligence would spontaneously emerge by cramming more and more data into bigger and bigger models.”
François CholletJul 3, 2025▶ 1:27François Chollet: How We Get To AGI · Y Combinator
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Chollet: All inventive AI systems rely on discrete search
“All known AI systems today that are capable of some kind of invention, some kind of creativity, they rely on discrete search.”
François CholletJul 3, 2025▶ 27:37François Chollet: How We Get To AGI · Y Combinator
Insight
Chollet: Current LLM Stack Can Fully Automate Any Formally Verifiable Domain
“And I think right now we're in this situation where any problem where the solutions you've proposed can be formally verified, and you can actually trust the reward signal. It's not just some guess made by a model. Any domain like this can be fully automated wi…”
François CholletMar 27, 2026▶ 6:40François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI · Y Combinator
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