Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Early life and education Blaise Agüera y Arcas was born in Providence, Rhode Island to a Spanish father and an American mother. In 1998 Agüera y Arcas graduated from Princeton University where he received a B.A. in physics.

Seadragon

In 2003, Agüera y Arcas founded Sand Codex, later renamed Seadragon Software. He moved to Seattle in 2004 to accommodate his wife's new role at the University of Washington. In 2004, he devised a computational method for the Library of Congress to create color composite images of almost two thousand negatives by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

Microsoft In 2006, Agüera y Arcas sold Seadragon to Microsoft Live Labs.

At Microsoft, Agüera y Arcas was the architect leading Bing Maps and Bing Mobile and was named a Distinguished Engineer in 2011. He collaborated with Ricoh to make the Theta, a 360° camera whose captured content displayed in Photosynth.

While at Microsoft, Agüera y Arcas suggested that technology should be designed for women. He cited a gap between the extent to which technology is designed for women and the market opportunity women represent, given trends in graduation rates and earnings.

Google

In 2013, Agüera y Arcas left Microsoft to lead a new machine intelligence effort at Google, along with programs in computer vision and computational photography. Fast Company, International Business Times, and ValueWalk.

At Google, Agüera y Arcas contributed to developments in on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel, and led the invention of Federated Learning, which fuses machine intelligence and art. The program's first public exhibit was on February 26, 2016 at the Gray Area, where Agüera y Arcas was the keynote speaker. On June 1, 2016, the program held the MAMI (Music, Art, and Machine Intelligence) show.

In 2021, Agüera y Arcas published an opinion on his experience with the latest generation large language models in the form of AI chatbot LaMDA stating that "no objective answer is possible to the question of when an 'it' becomes a 'who'."

In 2024, Agüera y Arcas and his Paradigms of Intelligence team, with The University of Chicago, published research on the emergence of self-replicating programs in computational environments, contributing to advancements in the fields of Origins of Life and Artificial Life.

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

Publications

Books

Essays and op-eds

“Art in the Age of Machine Intelligence”, Medium, February 2016. “Physiognomy's New Clothes”, (co-authored with Margaret Mitchell, Alexander Todorov), Medium, May 2017. “Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes?”, (co-authored with Margaret Mitchell, Alexander Todorov), Medium, January 2018. “Do large language models understand us?”, Medium, December 2021. “The Illusion Of AI's Existential Risk”, (co-authored with Blake Richards, Guillaume Lajoie, Dhanya Sridhar), Noema Magazine, July 2023. “Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here”, (co-authored with Peter Norvig), Noema Magazine, October 2023. “Our attitudes towards AI reveal how we really feel about human intelligence”, The Guardian, July 2024. “In the Beginning, There Was Computation”, Nautilus, August 2024. “AI Is Evolving — And Changing Our Understanding Of Intelligence”, (co-authored with James Manyika), Noema Magazine, April 2025. “Life, Intelligence, and Consciousness: A Functional Perspective”, Long Now, August 2025. “Is Life a Form of Computation?”, The MIT Press Reader, September 2025. “Consciousness Across Three Worldviews”, (co-authored with Swami Sarvapriyananda, Carlo Rovelli), Noema Magazine, September 2025. “What is the future of intelligence? The answer could lie in the story of its evolution”, Nature, November 2025.

TED Talks

Honors and awards In 2008, Agüera y Arcas was named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 TR35.

Fast Company has named Agüera y Arcas one of the "Most Creative People in Business" in 2009 and in 2014.

Agüera y Arcas' books Ubi Sunt (2022) and Who Are We Now? (2023) were both recognized with AIGA's 50 Books | 50 Covers award. Who Are We Now? also received Tokyo TDC's RGB Prize in 2025.