Ndea, a pioneering AI startup founded by François Chollet and Mike Knoop, is setting its sights on the ambitious goal of developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). François Chollet, a renowned Google AI researcher and Stanford academic, has embarked on this new venture after nearly a decade at Google. Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and its head of AI, is also stepping away from his daily responsibilities at Zapier to dedicate his efforts to Ndea. The startup seeks to create innovative AI systems that can revolutionize the field through novel designs and techniques.
Chollet, widely recognized for creating Keras, an influential open-source API for AI model creation, brings his expertise and vision to Ndea. The company will focus on establishing an AI research and science lab to explore the frontiers of AI technology. Program synthesis, a technique allowing AI to generalize solutions from limited examples, lies at the core of Ndea's strategy to unlock AGI. This approach aims to overcome some of the most challenging obstacles in current AI research.
"We’re assembling the world’s top program synthesis team." – Mike Knoop
Knoop's commitment to Ndea reflects the startup's ambitious objectives. He emphasizes the potential of deep learning-guided program synthesis as a means to create AGI capable of innovation and adaptation. This forward-thinking approach offers a glimpse into the future, promising discoveries and inventions that might otherwise take decades or centuries.
"Our first focus is on deep learning-guided program synthesis to create AGI that can invent, adapt, and innovate … But even more exciting is the chance to metaphorically time-travel into the future: learn, invent, and discover things that would not organically happen for decades or even centuries." – Mike Knoop
While Ndea has not publicly disclosed any external capital investments, its ambitions echo the moves of other notable figures in the AI industry. Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, has also founded an AI lab named Safe Superintelligence, which has successfully raised over $1 billion from prominent investors such as Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.
Ndea believes that program synthesis is gaining traction among frontier AI labs globally. This method provides a promising avenue for achieving breakthroughs in AI research, equipping machines to learn as effectively as humans and to continuously improve without significant bottlenecks.
"We believe we have a small but real chance of achieving a breakthrough — creating AI that can learn at least as efficiently as people, and that can keep improving over time with no bottlenecks in sight." – François Chollet
"We are not alone in recognizing the potential of program synthesis — it’s a technique every frontier AI lab is now starting to explore," – Ndea's website
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