ARC-AGI Benchmark Creator François Chollet Launches his AGI Lab ‘Ndea’

Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) benchmark creator François Chollet and Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop have launched Ndea, a new research lab dedicated to creating AGI. 

AGI refers to AI systems capable of performing a broad range of tasks at human-level ability, a goal many organisations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and others, are striving to achieve.

Ndea focuses on program synthesis. It is positioning itself as a pioneer in the pursuit of AGI by combining program synthesis with advanced deep-learning techniques. The lab is currently hiring remote researchers to assemble a world-class team.

In a recent post on X, Chollet explained the lab’s vision, “I’ve been talking about some of these ideas, merging ‘System 1’ deep learning with ‘System 2’ program search, on-the-fly knowledge recombination in the face of new tasks, lifelong learning, autonomous abstraction generation since 2017. While I was at Google, this type of research was a side project.” Chollet announced his exit from Google last year, where he said he would continue to advise the company. 

Last month, during OpenAI’s ‘12 days of shipmas’, the company soft-announced AGI through the introduction of the next-generation frontier models o3 and o3 Mini. These models achieved state-of-the-art performance, nearing 90%, on the ARC-AGI benchmark, surpassing human performance. Chollet disregarded this claim as premature. The ARC team even announced a newer and upgraded evaluation (ARC-AGI benchmark 2).

Alongside Chollet, Knoop, who is stepping back from his daily role at Zapier to focus on Ndea, emphasised the lab’s ambitious mission. “Creating AGI is a pivotal moment in human history. Many have ideas about how, including us. But it doesn’t exist yet! Until we achieve AGI, we need to create the strongest possible environment for innovation. The world deserves every shot at making it happen,” he shared on X.