Blaise Agüera y Arcas is an author, AI researcher and Vice President / Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi) – an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, with a focus on the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution and Artificial Life.

During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.

In 2025, Blaise was appointed to the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a selective group of researchers advancing complex-systems science.

Blaise has authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as three previous books, Ubi Sunt, Who Are We Now? and What Is Life?. His latest book What Is Intelligence? is available now via Antikythera and MIT Press.

Learn more about Blaise’s work at Google.

Learn more about Blaise’s work at the Santa Fe Institute.