Guillaume Verdon

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]

Guillaume Verdon
Born	Guillaume Verdon-Akzam[1] Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Other names	BasedBeffJezos
Education	McGill University (BS)[2] University of Waterloo (MMath)[2][3]
Known for	Founder, Extropic AI Effective accelerationism Quantum Machine Learning

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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[10][11] 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][12][13] During his time at Google X Verdon pioneered and worked on quantum graph neural networks,^[14] and quantum Hamiltonian-based models.^[15] He has several patents^[16] 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.^[17][18][19] The company recently announced the completion of a $14.1 million seed round.^[20][10] 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".^[10][21] On March 24, 2025, Wired reported that Verdon was continuing to work on a "new kind of chip to accelerate AI," through Extropic.^[22]

Effective accelerationism

Main article: Effective accelerationism

Verdon wrote under the pseudonym BasedBeffJezos and was a co-founder 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.^[10][19] 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]