Guillaume Verdon

Guillaume Verdon, a Canadian, studied mathematics, physics and quantum information at McGill University, then at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute.⁠[1]

On December 15, 2016, as Guillaume Verdon-Akzam, he defended his master’s thesis, Probing Quantum Fields: Measurements and Quantum Energy Teleportation, at Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing in the Department of Applied Mathematics, supervised by Achim Kempf.⁠[2]

In March 2019 Kempf’s group announced a Google Faculty Research Award to work with GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry on quantum machine learning, naming his PhD student Verdon as being at the forefront of the work.⁠[3]

On March 6, 2020, he was second author, with Michael Broughton, Trevor McCourt and others, of “TensorFlow Quantum: A Software Framework for Quantum Machine Learning,” posted to arXiv and introducing TensorFlow Quantum, an open-source library for rapidly prototyping hybrid quantum-classical models.⁠[4]

He had been quantum tech lead at Alphabet’s X, where he helped found TensorFlow Quantum, and went on to found Extropic with Trevor McCourt as chief technology officer.⁠[1]

Extropic says it was founded in 2022 to build the world’s most energy-efficient computers, with founders and staff drawn from companies including Google, IBM, Apple and Microsoft.⁠[5]

In December 2023 ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry identified the former Google quantum computing engineer as the person behind the X handle “Beff Jezos.” He is one of the leaders of the “effective accelerationism” (e/acc) movement, whose adherents argue for propelling technological progress at nearly any cost.⁠[6]

That month Extropic announced a $14.1 million seed round led by Kindred Ventures.⁠[1]

On December 29, 2023, he appeared on episode 407 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, which introduced him as a physicist, quantum computing researcher and founder of the e/acc movement, known on Twitter as Beff Jezos; topics included thermodynamics, being doxxed, AI risk, quantum machine learning and Extropic.⁠[7]

On the show he said, “I'm for billionaires. I know this is a controversial statement sometimes.”⁠[6]

In December 2024 he discussed effective accelerationism, the politics of AI and Extropic’s aim for artificial general intelligence to arrive quickly and stay beyond the control of any single company or government on Reason’s podcast. Its introduction noted that the venture capitalist Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry had called Based Beff Jezos a “patron saint of techno-optimism,” while detractors called the account “unhinged” and “absolutely toxic for the AI discourse.”⁠[8]

In March 2025 Extropic showed results of controlling thermodynamic fluctuations in conventional silicon to create probabilistic bits (p-bits), aiming for a chip three to four orders of magnitude more efficient than today’s hardware. He said: “The reality is that the most computationally-hungry workloads are Monte Carlo simulations.”⁠[9]

On October 29, 2025, Extropic set out its Thermodynamic Sampling Unit (TSU), which uses transistor-based probabilistic bits to sample from programmable probability distributions, introduced a generative algorithm called the Denoising Thermodynamic Model to run on it and open-sourced the simulation library thrml; the company said simulations on small benchmarks suggested it could be 10,000 times more energy efficient than modern GPU algorithms.⁠[10]

The same day the XTR-0 development platform, combining an FPGA with two X0 probabilistic chips, was shared with a handful of partners including frontier AI labs and weather-modeling startups. He said it let all sorts of developers “kick the tires”; the company planned a Z1 chip with 250,000 p-bits for the following year.⁠[11]

In summer 2026 Extropic released Torx, an open-source stochastic differentiable programming framework, and said it had built dozens of XTR-0 systems for early adopters and an XTR-0 cluster for remote experimentation, with its Z1 chip at tapeout.⁠[12]

Its hardware page lists two Z1 products for early access in 2027: the M.2 Z1 Stick, with over half a million pbits for low-power edge uses such as augmented reality and robotics, and the PCIe Z1 Card, with over 4 million pbits.⁠[13]

On July 29, 2026, Extropic announced a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $75 million through the CHIPS Research and Development Office to develop TSUs and establish a domestic manufacturing path. He said: “The current era of AI is one of exponential acceleration, and energy is its binding constraint.”⁠[14]

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

X (Beff Jezos): Public account: https://x.com/BasedBeffJezos (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

Extropic: Official website: https://extropic.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]