In just a few short months, Nirvanic has gone from a “stealth” AI project whispered about in Vancouver’s AI community to one being viewed and commented upon online by literally hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. All of it based on word of mouth and almost no outreach.
All this with two full time employees and a few amazing contractors and friends. What heights will we reach when we start to scale?
CEO Suzanne Gildert presenting to a business crowd in Toronto in January.
With hardly any fanfare, our little venture with big ambitions is resonating. The idea that we’re exploring consciousness technologies strikes a chord with people from all walks of life. Here’s just a sample:
An Oxford University physics professor wants to talk about the science behind our technology
Excited by “conscious robots,” a 16-year old girl from Maryland wrote a beautiful letter asking to intern with us
A New York journalist is seeking comment
A CEO from a biotech wants to collaborate
Construction workers, one in Connecticut and another in Toronto cheer us on daily
Dozens of PhDs in machine learning have reached us - some will volunteer!
Quantum computing professionals are seeking partnerships
Medical doctors and mind philosophers want us on their podcasts
We are not seeking this attention! But it warms our hearts. Last post, we mentioned an Australian journalist writing, “Ghost in the Machine.” It was a great feature report on Nirvanic. There will be more.
Our Nirvanic X account just clocked 358,000 impressions, most of it in 2025. On top, we get dozens of emails per day, discussing business, and offering suggestions. By some accounts there are dozens of theories about consciousness. We see opportunity to bring this scientific community together, and to find common ground. Just under the surface, is a whole movement of people who’ve been quietly thinking about machine consciousness for years.
Many are storied experts and philosophers. Others are just “well wishers” — ordinary people dropping us a note to say they are intrigued by Nirvanic, and how we appear to be on to something spectacular. We know we don’t have all the answers! But this voyage of discovery must start somewhere. And our momentum is attracting some very interesting players.
We think the huge upturn in interest is because consciousness is profoundly spiritual and philosophical. We get into so many debates about just ‘what is consciousness?’
We want our next steps to be deeply rigorous and scientific. Any technology built upon new knowledge we discover depends upon it. And there are green fields, particularly in quantum mechanics. We may be able to finally answer questions about the Observer Effect.
We stand on the shoulders of many scientific greats before us, especially the entire Science of Consciousness movement, hosting conferences for decades that have taken consciousness research from the forbidden to the forefront.
Dr. Stuart Hameroff at the annual Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, AZ
Simon Sinek said great companies sell what they believe, not just what they sell. For this reason, we’ve spoken proudly about our primary mission — to understand consciousness. We have a business model to sell software as a service to enhance agentic AI systems that can handle novel and nuanced scenarios, with little to no prior training —something today's AIs do poorly and with enormous power demands. But first and foremost, we are fascinated by what we are. Why we experience at all.
And with our sudden and unexpected global attention, comes greater inspection and scrutiny. We welcome it. A well known science communicator and physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, in her usual comedic and sharp-witted way, made a critical video about our project. Within 48 hours, we jacked together a professional-looking response video, and our tweet about it reached 600,000 views. And by the way, it’s perfectly okay for smart physicists to disagree with each other. I like Sabine a lot, and would love to go on a podcast together, or just have a glass of wine! We’ve both pursued unique paths after academia.
Scientific rigour is what we also demand for ourselves at Nirvanic. So far, we have made no scientific claims. But I’m close to putting together a “quantum computing council” made up of theoretical quantum physicists, QC pros, cognitive scientists, and AI experts, to give the first round of peer review to our scientific plans. We’re also proud to say that we’re working with D-Wave, my old employer, to conduct millions of queries using their QPUs. We are officially quantum!
Based on the great feedback, we’ll have a new FAQ shortly. We've also been asked to provide more scientific details about what we are doing, so we are in the process of preparing a long-form technical white paper that summarizes our theoretical and practical approach to exploring quantum consciousness. We will be publishing this in the next couple of months, so stay tuned!
With this momentum, we’re gearing up for bigger outreach mainly in the U.S., including major events that we believe will be game-changers. Our presentations in Silicon Valley and Toronto have already sparked excitement—expect more to come.
Lastly, enjoy this brand video above that we made last year. Our business has evolved a lot since then, but our values have not. It’s about consciousness. And that’s everything we are.
Much love,
Suzanne 🔬❤️
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