Geordie Rose
Canadian physicist and entrepreneur; co-founder of Sanctuary AI and D-Wave Systems.
Geordie Rose is a Canadian physicist and repeat entrepreneur whose companies have operated at the frontier of quantum computing and artificial intelligence over more than two decades. He co-founded D-Wave Systems in 1999 (the first commercial quantum computing company), Kindred in 2014, and Sanctuary AI in 2018. Sanctuary AI develops the Phoenix humanoid platform, now in its seventh generation.
Role in humanoid robotics
Rose founded Sanctuary AI with a stated ambition to build human-equivalent general intelligence embodied in a humanoid form. The company's approach differs from most other commercial humanoid manufacturers in that Sanctuary AI treats the humanoid form as the substrate for general intelligence rather than as an industrial tool with specific task profiles. This positioning has shaped the Phoenix platform's engineering choices, particularly the emphasis on high-degree-of-freedom hands and task-transfer software architecture.
Under Rose's leadership, Sanctuary AI has secured a series of enterprise pilot deployments in retail and light industrial sectors and has been an active voice in industry discussions of general-purpose humanoid intelligence.
Background
Rose completed his doctorate in theoretical physics at the University of British Columbia. His early career work was in quantum computing, which produced D-Wave Systems (co-founded with Haig Farris and Alexandre Zagoskin). He subsequently co-founded Kindred, an artificial intelligence and robotics company that pursued industrial task-transfer learning. Sanctuary AI, founded in 2018 with Suzanne Gildert and Olivia Norton, was Rose's third entrepreneurial venture at the frontier of computation and embodied intelligence.