Guillaume Verdon-Akzam, also known as Guillaume Verdon, or Gill Verdon[4] is a Canadian mathematical physicist, quantum computing researcher, serial entrepreneur, and writer who is a key contributor of Google's quantum machine learning software, Tensorflow Quantum.[5] 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.[2][7] He attended University of Waterloo for graduate studies where he completed Master's work in 2017[3][8] at the Institute for Quantum Computing and continued with Achim Kempf as his PhD supervisor.[1] He presented papers as a Guest Speaker at NASA's 2018 Adiabatic Quantum Computing conference.[2][9]
In 2017, Verdon co-founded Everettian Technologies and became its chief scientific officer.[10] The company was named after Hugh Everett III, an early Canadian start-up focused on quantum machine learning solutions. He also had a side venture into NFTs related to quantum information which provided capital for his later startup Extropic AI.[11][12] Verdon has worked at Alphabet & Google and had primary responsibility for theoretical work on the team that introduced the TensorFlow Quantum library for quantum machine learning.[5][13][14] During his time at Google X Verdon pioneered and worked on quantum graph neural networks,[15] and quantum Hamiltonian-based models.[16] He has several patents[17] 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.[18][19][20] The company recently announced the completion of a $14.1 million seed round.[21][11] Extropic AI was initially operating in stealth-mode and is focused on building chips specifically intended for running LLMs according to Verdon a "type of physics-based computer that is not quantum".[11][22]
Verdon wrote under the pseudonym BasedBeffJezos and was a co-founders of the effective accelerationism (e/acc) movement. The origin of the movement can be traced back to a May 2022 newsletter published by him and 3 other authors.[23][24][25]
In its coverage of the movement Forbes outed Verdon as the author behind his pseudonymous account.[11][20] Since his naming he has spoken on podcasts & debated publicly those with conflicting views on AI safety (including with Connor Leahy[26]) and other issues of technological progress.[27]
