Who is the creator of Keras?

François Chollet created Keras, the high-level Python library for building and training neural networks. He released it as open source on 27 March 2015 and led its development through his years at Google, from 2015 to November 2024.

Chollet started Keras during research for a project called ONEIROS (Open-ended Neuro-Electronic Intelligent Robot Operating System). The name is Greek: κέρας means horn, after the gate of horn in Homer's Odyssey, through which dreams that come true reach people. Keras first ran on Theano, then also on TensorFlow, and as tf.keras became the standard high-level API of TensorFlow 2.0 (2019). Keras 3, released in November 2023, runs on JAX, TensorFlow or PyTorch.

Chollet also wrote the book Deep Learning with Python (Manning, first edition 2017), and in 2019 introduced the ARC benchmark (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) in his paper "On the Measure of Intelligence". In 2025 he co-founded the research lab Ndea with Mike Knoop.