Guillaume Verdon

Guillaume Verdon founded Extropic to build a thermodynamic computing substrate, hardware whose physical noise does the sampling that digital machines have to compute. The company’s stack runs from the Torx language through the Thermalizers compiler to the THRML sampling framework, all open sourced, and its stated efficiency claim is 100x to 10,000x over GPU inference, stated as its own figure. The October 2026 post First Sparks of Thermodynamic Recursive Intelligence, with Alexander Neagoe and Seth Morton, reports post-training a 35B parameter open model on about 50 reproduction tasks from the Hinton tradition, tripling its held out reward in 100 RL steps, with the first large scale chips planned for 2027. The declared ambition is an automated research loop over thermodynamic sampling units, more discoveries per joule.

Much of that program is public under a pseudonym. Beff Jezos is Verdon, as he confirmed in 2023, and the e/acc movement’s energy framed argument for growth and against deceleration is largely written in that name. In September 2026 the pseudonym launched Kardashev Research, a nonprofit research initiative whose tagline is that energy defines the scale and intelligence shortens the path, with a stated agenda of studying intelligence across substrates through thermodynamics and information theory. The launch is early, the legal structure and funding are pending, and the community tokens attached to it carry the project’s own caveat that their utilities are plans, not guarantees.

He is covered here under the Builder position because the claim he makes is about what hardware does. The thermodynamic substrate class his chips implement, p-bit lattices and coupled oscillator dynamics, is the same class the Thermodynamic Console on this site emulates in software, and his efficiency framing feeds directly into this site’s reading of the Kardashev scale as an energy budget. He offers no verdict on consciousness, and none is attributed to him here. The vendor figures are his company’s, and the honest ledger on the console page keeps them labeled that way.

Known for. Extropic's thermodynamic computing hardware and the Z1 chip, the e/acc movement written under the Beff Jezos pseudonym, and the 2026 Kardashev Research launch

Coverage on this site

• The Kardashev scale as an energy budget for growing consciousness October 2026

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Guillaume Verdon is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.