François Chollet: How We Get To AGI

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. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://workatastartup.com 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 33:44 - NDEA: a new AI research lab