Gil Verdon

About

Guillaume "Gil" Verdon is the founder and CEO of Extropic AI, a San Francisco-based startup pioneering thermodynamic computing—a revolutionary physics-based paradigm that harnesses out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics and probabilistic "p-bits" to create vastly more energy-efficient accelerators for generative AI, promising thousands-fold reductions in power consumption compared to traditional silicon chips while natively supporting advanced energy-based models critical for scaling toward AGI. A Canadian physicist with a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing, Verdon previously led quantum machine learning research at Alphabet's X lab, co-creating TensorFlow Quantum before pivoting from noisy quantum hardware to broader thermodynamic approaches amid industry challenges. Doxxed in 2023 as the pseudonymous Beff Jezos—the fiery proponent of effective accelerationism (e/acc), a techno-optimist movement urging unrelenting AI progress against decelerationists—Verdon has leveraged his viral persona to attract talent and hype, raising $14.1M in seed funding and advancing Extropic's chips toward market availability in late 2025, positioning the company as a bold challenger to Nvidia in the exploding AI hardware race for sustainable, abundant computation.