Draft:Guillaume Verdon

Guillaume Verdon is an entrepreneur, theoretical physicist, quantum computing researcher, and philosophical writer.

Education
Verdon attended McGill University as an undergraduate and graduated with honors with a double major in Mathematics & Physics. 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. He presented papers as a Guest Speaker at NASA's 2018 Adiabatic Quantum Computing conference.

Career
Verdon was the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Everettian Technologies, an early Canadian start-up focused on Quantum machine learning solutions. He also had a side venture into NFTs related to quantum physics/information which provided capital for his later startup Extropic AI. 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. During his time at Google X Verdon pioneered and worked on Quantum Graph Neural Networks, quantum Magnetoencephalography, and Quantum Hamiltonian-Based Models. He has several patents with Google X covering quantum computing, quantum machine learning, and signal processing.

Verdon is now working at a startup he founded in 2022, Extropic AI. The company recently announced the completion of a $14.1 million seed round. 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".

Effective accelerationism
Verdon writing under the pseudonym BasedBeffJezos was one of the co-founders of the effective acceleration (e/acc) movement. The origin of the movement can be traced back to a May 2022 newsletter published by him and 3 other authors. In its coverage of the movement Forbes outed Verdon as the author behind his pseudonymous account. Since his naming he has spoken on podcasts & debated publicly those with conflicting views on AI safety and other issues of technological progress.