Trevor McCourt
Extropic, Co-Founder and CTO
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
Trevor McCourt is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Extropic, after completing his doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on probabilistic and analog hardware architectures for energy-based machine learning. At Extropic, he leads the hardware-software co-design linking sub-threshold CMOS probabilistic circuits with open-source simulation tools such as thrml and the Z1 thermodynamic sampling unit roadmap.
As senior co-author with Andraž Jelinčič, Isaac Chuang, and Guillaume Verdon on the Denoising Thermodynamic Computer Architecture (arXiv:2510.23972) and the subsequent Z1T sparse transformer co-design, McCourt demonstrated how continuous-time Markov chain sampling on fixed-locality transistor networks can execute generative denoising steps without dense digital floating-point matrix multiplications. The papers report simulated energy reductions of up to four orders of magnitude per sample relative to GPU baselines, figures this site tracks strictly as vendor and simulation projections ahead of independent silicon benchmarks.
McCourt is categorized as a Builder because his work concerns the physical realization of stochastic sampling hardware rather than a theory of phenomenal consciousness. His architectures test whether complex generative dynamics can settle natively in thermal noise, the same physical principle explored in software emulation on this site’s Thermodynamic Computing hub.
Known for. Co-founder and CTO of Extropic, Denoising Thermodynamic Computer Architecture (DTCA), Z1 thermodynamic sampling units, Z1T sparse transformer co-design, THRML
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Isaac ChuangMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Department of PhysicsQuantum Computation and Quantum Information (with Michael Nielsen), NMR quantum computing, ion traps, co-author of the Denoising Thermodynamic Computer Architecture (DTCA) with Extropic
- Guillaume VerdonExtropic, San Francisco, founder. Kardashev Research, the nonprofit research initiative announced under the Beff Jezos pseudonymExtropic's thermodynamic computing hardware and the Z1 chip, the e/acc movement written under the Beff Jezos pseudonym, and the 2026 Kardashev Research launch
- Navid Anjum AaditDepartment of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University (present address); previously University of California, Santa BarbaraFirst author of the sparse Ising machine on FPGAs (Nature Electronics, 2022) and of the programmable probabilistic computer with one million p-bits (arXiv 2606.25313, 2026)
- Vikas AgnihotriIndependent Aerospace and Neuromorphic Systems ResearcherNeuromorphic Satellite Intelligence framework, radiation-induced energy overhead model for spiking neural hardware, constrained on-orbit STDP
- Matt AngleParadromicsFounder and CEO of Paradromics, developer of the Connexus Direct Data Interface high-data-rate brain-computer interface
- Isabella R. BeckettCoauthor of the MaleCNS preprint comparing male and female Drosophila brain connectomes
Trevor McCourt 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.