Guillaume Verdon
Canadian physicist and entrepreneur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Guillaume Verdon-Akzam, also known as Guillaume Verdon or Gill Verdon,[4] is a Canadian mathematical physicist, quantum computing researcher, entrepreneur, and writer who is a key contributor of Google's quantum machine learning software, Tensorflow Quantum.[5]
University of Waterloo (MMath)[2][3]
Guillaume Verdon | |
|---|---|
| Born | Guillaume Verdon-Akzam[1] Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Other name | BasedBeffJezos |
| Citizenship | Canadian |
| Education | McGill University (BS)[2] University of Waterloo (MMath)[2][3] |
| Years active | 2013-present |
| Known for |
|
He is also a co-founder of the effective accelerationism movement and the start-up company Extropic AI which operates at the intersection between physics-based computing and artificial intelligence.[6]
Education and career
Verdon attended McGill University as an undergraduate and graduated with honors with a double major in Mathematics & Physics.[citation needed] He attended University of Waterloo for graduate studies where he completed Master's work in 2017 at the Institute for Quantum Computing and continued with Achim Kempf as his PhD supervisor.[3][1][7] He was also given the IQC Entrance Award at Waterloo.[8] Verdon presented papers as a Guest Speaker at NASA's 2018 Adiabatic Quantum Computing conference.[2]
In 2017, Verdon co-founded Everettian Technologies and served as its chief scientific officer.[citation needed] The company was named after Hugh Everett III, and was an early Canadian start-up focused on quantum machine learning solutions.[citation needed] He also had a side venture into NFTs related to quantum information, which provided capital for his later startup Extropic AI.[9][10]Verdon has worked at Google and had primary responsibility for theoretical work on the team that introduced the TensorFlow Quantum library for quantum machine learning.[5][11][12] During his time at Google X, Verdon introduced and worked on quantum graph neural networks,[13] and quantum Hamiltonian-based models.[14] He has several patents[15] with Google X covering quantum computing, quantum machine learning, and signal processing.
In 2022, Verdon and Trevor Mccourt co-founded Extropic AI, which focuses on building a thermodynamic hardware platform for accelerating AI research[16][17] and announced the next year the completion of a $14.1 million seed round.[18] Extropic AI was initially operating in stealth-mode and said that it was focused on building chips specifically intended for running LLMs.[9][19] In 2025, Wired reported that Verdon was continuing to work through Extropic AI on a new kind of chip that handles probabilistic bits instead of deterministic bits.[20][21]
Effective accelerationism
Verdon wrote under the pseudonym BasedBeffJezos and was a co-founder of the effective accelerationism (e/acc) movement.[9] The origin of the movement can be traced back to a May 2022 newsletter publxished by him and 3 other authors.[22][23][24] In its coverage of the movement, Forbes outed Verdon as the author behind his pseudonymous account.[9][17] Since his naming, he has publicly spoken on podcasts and debated with those who have conflicting views on AI safety (such as Connor Leahy)[25] and other issues of technological progress.[26]