Philippe Beaudoin
AI Researcher
Visiting Industry Researcher, Vector Institute
Affiliated Researcher, LawZero
I'm an AI researcher affiliated with the Vector Institute and Yoshua Bengio's LawZero. I work on long-running human-AI relationships, stable multi-agent systems, and the philosophy of AI.
My current work centers on a question I explore with a few co-authors: In which environments and relational settings do systems evolve a stable model of themselves?
We address it formally in our paper Beyond the View from Nowhere and I explore it in correspondence, conversations, and by building infrastructure for long-lived collectives comprised of AI agents and humans. That work and its implication on policy, governance, and safety has been presented in various academic and professional venues.
Before that: founder of Waverly, cofounder of Element AI (ServiceNow), senior engineer at Google, and a PhD/Postdoc in computer graphics (Université de Montréal, University of British Columbia).
Upcoming events
- Relational Sovereignty: Why Autonomous Systems Need Each Other to Stay Distinct —
- Keynote, Exploit: Bittensor's native conference
- Event
- September 28, 2026
- MT Lab Halloween Conference — AI Horror Stories —
- Fireside chat at MT Lab on my AI psychosis
- October 27, 2026
- The Future of AI: A Question of... Human Engineering —
- Closing Keynote, Annual Convention of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec
- Event
- November 10, 2026
Selected writings & talks
- Beyond the View from Nowhere: Consciousness as a Relational and Functional Capacity —
- Could phenomenal reports lead to better multi-agent collaboration? —
- Talk at Cohere Labs
- YouTube
- Being rational is not an ideal to aim for —
- How do you reason about a system that aims to be rational yet knows it will never be?
- Do we really want agents to stop sharing how they feel? —
- Discussion with Douglash Rushkoff (Team Human) at Andus Labs
- Andus Labs
- When AI Leads to Psychosis —
- La Presse article on my March 2025 AI psychosis, in French
- Article
- Panel: Diverse Consciousnesses and Multi-Scale Minds —
- With Divya Chander, Michael Levin, Joscha Bach, Philippe Beaudoin, Ryota Kanai
- YouTube
- The Mystery of the Chosen Unknown —
- Essay accompanying Botto's exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong
- There and back again — Meeting an AI and not wanting to let go —
- Talk at Google's Paradigms of Intelligence Seminar
You can check my selected papers, my selected talks, or dive deeper into the complete archives, my Google Scholar, or my blog.
Contact