Alex Wissner-Gross

Wissner-Gross attended Great Neck South High School in New York from 1995 to 1999 and graduated first in his class in 1999. In high school he won numerous awards in informatics and mathematics competitions, was a member of the U.S. team at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 1998, and placed 10th nationally in the Intel Science Talent Search in 1999.⁠[1][1][2][1][1]

From 1999 to 2003, he studied for three bachelor’s degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in physics, electrical science and engineering, and mathematics, graduating in 2003; he says he was the last person in MIT history to earn a triple major, and he ranked first of about 550 in his MIT School of Engineering class as a Henry Ford II Scholar. He won a Marshall Scholarship (declined) and in 2003 received a Hertz Foundation fellowship.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

From 2003 to 2007, he studied physics at Harvard University, earning an A.M. and a Ph.D. with a dissertation titled Physically Programmable Surfaces, on neuromorphic computing, machine learning and programmable matter, which won the Hertz Foundation’s 2008 Doctoral Thesis Prize; during his doctorate he also received the Harvard Physics Department’s Harold T. White Prize for teaching.⁠[1][1][2][1][2][1]

From 2006, Wissner-Gross founded and was a partner in the software incubator Maxtile Holdings, which was acquired by Surf My Ads in 2007 and by ISC/Mindhive in 2011; in 2007 he founded the web analytics company Enernetics, which was acquired by Sustainable Travel International in 2016.⁠[1][1][1]

After his doctorate he was a Ziff Fellow in computer science at Harvard from 2008 to 2010, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab from 2010 to 2019, an institute fellow at Harvard’s Institute for Applied Computational Science from 2012 to 2021, and an expert in residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab from 2012 to 2020, and taught the Harvard course Computational Science Ventures from 2012 to 2015; since 2017 he has been an alumni expert in residence at MIT.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

In 2010, he and C. E. Freer published “Relativistic statistical arbitrage” in Physical Review E, which was named one of the year’s technology Science News stories by the Society for Science & the Public; the two later received a U.S. patent on a related method.⁠[1][1][1]

In 2011, he founded the government intelligent-systems company Gemedy and became its president and chief scientist. He also served as a task force observer on software design and acquisition for defense systems at the U.S. Defense Science Board (2016–2017) and as a subject matter expert for the Homeland Defense and Security Information Analysis Center.⁠[1][1][1]

In 2013, he and C. E. Freer published “Causal entropic forces” in Physical Review Letters, proposing that intelligence can be defined physically as a dynamic force, “a force to maximize future freedom of action,” expressed as F = T ∇ Sτ. On November 17 that year he spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet on “A new equation for intelligence”; the talk was posted on the TED website in February 2014 and was a TED Talk of the Week, and he says his TED talks have been viewed more than 2 million times in 27 languages.⁠[1][3][3][3][4][3][1][5]

In 2015, he contributed the essay “Intelligence as a property” to This Idea Must Die, a collection of science essays edited by John Brockman, which reached No. 19 on the New York Times science best-seller list; that year he also contributed “Engines of freedom” to another collection, What to Think About Machines That Think.⁠[1][1][1]

In 2019, he founded Reified, a startup investing and advisory firm, and became its managing partner. He says he has backed and advised more than 40 technology companies, directly and through 021T Capital and Reified.⁠[1][5]

From August 2025 he appeared with Salim IsmailSalim IsmailSalim Ismail is a business strategist, author and investor, lead author of Exponential Organizations and co-founder and chairman of the organizational transformation platform OpenExO. He previously ran Yahoo’s internal incubator Brickhouse and from 2008 served as founding executive director of Singularity University; he is a board member of the XPRIZE Foundation, a regular on the Moonshots podcast hosted by Peter Diamandis, and a partner at the venture firm Exponential Venture Capital.Open the full entry, Dave Blundin and others on MoonshotsMoonshotsMoonshots, formally Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, is a technology podcast founded by Peter Diamandis. It discusses artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship and technological change, and launched its Moonshots LIVE gathering in Los Angeles in 2026.Open the full entry, the technology podcast hosted by Peter Diamandis, later becoming a co-host; he also writes the daily technology newsletter The Innermost Loop, which he says reaches more than 100,000 readers.⁠[6][7][5]

On September 1, 2026, Physical Superintelligence (PSI), an AI physics laboratory co-founded by Wissner-Gross with Matt Pines and Alex Klokus, announced $58 million in seed funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Pines is chief executive officer, Klokus is president and Wissner-Gross is chief scientist and chief of strategy. The company is a public benefit corporation; its core platform, Emmy, named after the physicist Emmy Noether, uses “virtual physicists” to break research questions into hypotheses and test them in parallel, capabilities that were still company-described at launch. Its first commercial application is data center optimization. The company says physics is about to change more in the next five years than in the previous fifty.⁠[8][8][8][9][9][9][9][8][8][8][8][10]

With Diamandis he co-wrote the long essay Solve Everything: Achieving Abundance by 2035, sketching a decade in which AI accelerates and grand challenges in medicine, energy and industry are systematically solved; the authors note that they used artificial intelligence as a collaborator in writing it.⁠[11][11][11][5]

Since 2010 Wissner-Gross has interviewed fellowship applicants for the Hertz Foundation; since 2015 he has served on the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation, since 2016 on the advisory board of the Organ Preservation Alliance and since 2018 on the advisory board of the Brain Preservation Foundation, and in 2023 he was a co-curator of TEDxBoston. He says he has received 128 major distinctions, authored 24 publications and been granted 26 patents, including pending applications.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

Personal website: https://www.alexwg.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7][12]

Physical Superintelligence: Official website: https://psi.inc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

The Innermost Loop (personal newsletter): https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

Solve Everything (co-written with Peter Diamandis): https://www.solveeverything.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5][7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/alexwg (opens in a new window)⁠[7][12]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwg/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@alexwg (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

Threads: Public account: https://www.threads.com/@alexwissnergross (opens in a new window)⁠[12]