Hello World!

Hi everyone!!!

My name is Geordie Rose. You can read about me here and/or follow my non-HR-approved antics on X where I am @realgeordierose.

I founded D-Wave in 1999. I was the CTO for most of my time there.

D-Wave was the world’s first quantum computing company. We revolutionized several technologies, including dilution refrigerators and superconducting processor fabrication. It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2022 ($1.6B IPO).

I left the world of building exotic computer systems in 2014 to co-found Kindred, where I was CEO. We built control systems for robots that used a combination of tele-operation, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. Kindred was acquired by Ocado for $262M in 2019.

In 2018 I co-founded Sanctuary, where I’m CEO.

This is the sort of thing we get up to here…

While Sanctuary looks like a robotics company, it isn’t. It’s an AI company. But for a new kind of AI that doesn’t quite exist yet, and isn’t well understood.

I Want to Describe Our Approach To Building AI

In the first half of my career, I oversaw the creation of a new kind of computer.

In the second half, my friends and I have been working on building a new kind of intelligence — the kind designed to provide ‘the spark of life’ to machines.

Some of the folks who will play major roles in the stories I’m going to tell. Left: me! Right: Mani Ranjbar, our VP-AI. Middle, Olivia Norton, co-founder and Chief Technology & Product Officer. We’ve worked together on the AI problem for more than a decade now.

This has been a long and frustrating journey, filled with a lot more failures than successes. But even though this problem is very, very hard, I think we may be close to solving it.

It is incredibly exciting to be able to witness this happening in real time.

In this blog post series, I’m going to do my best to walk you through how we think about this problem, what’s hard and what’s easy, and the kinds of technical choices we’ve made along the way. Some of these have worked out, and some have been spectacular failures.

I’m going to try to do this as clearly as I can. I want this to be something anyone can follow. For the experts, I’m going to provide deep dives into specifics and provide code and other assets for you to experiment with these ideas yourself.

Glad to have you join me as I … delve … into the depths of one approach to understanding and creating minds for machines.

This is going to be an adventure…