# Guillaume Verdon Canadian mathematical physicist, former Google quantum-computing researcher, and startup founder who, under the pseudonym **Beff Jezos** (@BasedBeffJezos), became the public face and chief evangelist of [[Effective Accelerationism]] — the techno-optimist ideology, branded "e/acc," that argues unrestricted AI development is a moral imperative and that slowing it down is the true existential risk. Verdon is co-founder and CEO of the AI-hardware startup [[Extropic]] and one of the connective figures translating accelerationist philosophy into Silicon Valley's anti-regulation, pro-buildout politics. ## Background - Canadian; studied mathematics and physics at McGill University, then completed graduate work (Master's and PhD) at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing and the Perimeter Institute, with Achim Kempf as PhD supervisor. - Worked at Google X / Alphabet on quantum machine learning, where he had primary responsibility for the theoretical work behind the **TensorFlow Quantum** library and worked on quantum graph neural networks and quantum Hamiltonian-based models. - Left Google to found [[Extropic]] (2022) with [[Trevor McCourt]], building a "thermodynamic computing" platform of probabilistic-bit chips pitched as a physics-native substrate for AI. ## The Beff Jezos persona and the e/acc movement Verdon ran the anonymous **@BasedBeffJezos** account on X as the loudest voice of [[Effective Accelerationism]], a movement whose name riffs on "effective altruism" while inverting its caution about AI. The earliest known reference traces to a **May 2022** newsletter authored by pseudonymous writers @BasedBeffJezos (Verdon), @bayeslord, @zestular, and @creatine_cycle. Verdon frames e/acc in quasi-scientific terms drawn from his physics background: technological progress increases the **thermodynamic free energy** available to civilization, making all human problems more solvable, and humanity's purpose is to climb the [[Kardashev Gradient]] by maximizing energy use. In this telling, AI safety advocates and regulators aren't protecting humanity — they're condemning it to stagnation and avoidable suffering. In **December 2023**, *Forbes* (Emily Baker-White) unmasked the Beff Jezos persona as Verdon, a then-largely-unknown quantum researcher. [[Marc Andreessen]] has praised "Based Beff Jezos" as a "patron saint of techno-optimism"; critics have called the persona "absolutely toxic for the AI discourse." ## Position in the tech-right ideological map Verdon sits at a hinge point connecting several clusters tracked in this vault: | Connection | How Verdon links to it | |------------|------------------------| | [[Effective Accelerationism]] | Co-founder and public figurehead; coined/popularized the "e/acc" brand. | | [[Nick Land]] | Verdon cites Land as e/acc's intellectual forebear; links to Land's writing as the "original founding text for accelerationism." Land publicly endorsed e/acc. | | [[Marc Andreessen]] | Andreessen's [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] is widely read as an e/acc document; he anointed Beff Jezos a "patron saint of techno-optimism." | | [[TESCREAL]] | e/acc partially inhabits the TESCREAL ideology bundle (transhumanism, cosmism, accelerationism). | | [[Russian Cosmism]] | The [[Kardashev Gradient]] / cosmic-destiny framing recycles Cosmist deep-time optimism. | | [[AI Arms Race]] | "Build faster than China" logic gives e/acc a national-security wrapper embraced by defense-tech hawks. | | [[Garry Tan]] / [[Balaji Srinivasan]] | Fellow Silicon Valley accelerationists who adopted "e/acc" and overlapping exit-and-build politics. | Where the white-nationalist strain of [[Accelerationism (White Nationalist)]] wants to hasten societal collapse, Verdon's e/acc is its optimistic mirror — same "accelerate, don't decelerate" reflex, repackaged as abundance and progress rather than chaos. The personnel and citations nonetheless overlap with the [[Curtis Yarvin]]–[[Nick Land]] neoreactionary axis, making e/acc, in effect, the [[Dark Enlightenment]] with better marketing. ## Extropic Through [[Extropic]] (co-founded with [[Trevor McCourt]]), Verdon turns the e/acc thesis into hardware: chips that compute with probabilistic bits to make AI radically more energy-efficient. The company raised a ~$14.1M seed round that closed in late 2023, led by Kindred Ventures, with participation including Valor Equity Partners — the [[Elon Musk]]–adjacent firm — among others. The pitch (more compute, more energy, fewer limits) is the accelerationist worldview rendered as a product roadmap. ## Politics and rhetoric Verdon's politics are libertarian-accelerationist rather than conventionally partisan, but they slot cleanly into the broader tech-right realignment: hostility to AI regulation, framing of safety advocates as incumbents or doomers, and a "freedom to compute" posture (he has floated the idea of a "Second Amendment for AI"). These positions made e/acc a useful ideological scaffolding for the deregulatory, build-without-oversight tech agenda that gained influence in Washington. ## See Also - [[Effective Accelerationism]] - [[Extropic]] - [[Nick Land]] - [[Marc Andreessen]] - [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] - [[TESCREAL]] - [[Russian Cosmism]] - [[Kardashev Gradient]] - [[Kardashev Scale]] - [[Accelerationism (White Nationalist)]] - [[Trevor McCourt]]