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[music] >> Jeremy, welcome to Giant Ideas. Thank you very much.
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Perhaps no one in the world is better placed to explain quantum than you, having having been in it for over 25 years as a professor.
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How would you how would you try and explain it to your your dinner party guests?
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Yeah, I guess I would just say um that quantum mechanics is a physics theory uh that's about 100 years old and it is in fact the most successful uh theory that humans have ever had in terms of its uh you know, accuracy and precision of making uh predictions and the degree to which it's been tested.
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And it tells us some really counterintuitive things about how the world actually is at the microscopic scale.
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So, it tells us that you know, a particle can be somehow in, you know, more than one place simultaneously.
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Um it tells us that two particles can be inextricably linked with one another such that doing something to one of them somehow instantaneously affects the other uh without um you know, no matter how far apart they are.
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You know, there's no transistor without quantum mechanics.
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You know, there's no semiconductors without quantum mechanics.
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So, you need a quantum mechanical uh description at the very bottom of a computer at the transistor level.
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But then immediately above that, the quantum mechanics gets abstracted away and you don't have to worry about it anymore.
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It's just a conventional what physicists call a classical uh system with, you know, binary logic, zeros and ones, and so on and so forth.
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And uh uh again, not a not a deeply satisfying uh explanation, but I think nevertheless starts to get into it.
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A quantum computer is one where that is not the case, where from the equivalent of the transistors all the way up to the applications, quantum mechanics is is uh threading uh through that system and it's harnessing these uh uh very surprising uh counterintuitive effects of quantum mechanics to do some things uh much, much faster than any conventional computer ever could.
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Uh and in some cases uh exponentially faster and things that are that are effectively impossible for conventional computers to do suddenly become uh impossible if you have a large-scale quantum computer and many of those things um we now understand are a very important uh to the world.
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Um tell us a bit about what quantum computers can do.
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Why do why do why does this matter for the world and for our listeners?
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Yeah, so in in the the in the abstract um without quantum computers, we are constrained to that small subspace of what is possible in uh in in chemistry, maths, physics, materials, and so on.
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Um so, we're fundamentally constrained without it and with it, we open up a whole new sort of green, you know, uh virgin territory of of new things that uh new things that we can do.
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Um and you know, it's interesting.
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I think governments are actually, in my experience and and, you know, we have engaged very closely with um with DARPA uh over the last uh several years as part of their uh quantum benchmarking initiative, which, you know, has involved them sort of testing out technical things.
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Um we have a you know, a sort of billion-dollar scale um partnerships in uh in Australia and in Chicago to build uh these first million-qubit scale systems.
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Uh and we've engaged with governments uh uh around the world beyond that.
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And it's it's interesting to me that principally, governments see this as as uh you know, something like rocket fuel to the economy, right?
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Like that's where their interest uh uh principally lie.
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And that's because um you know, the impact of the technology is going to be uh you know, very deep and wide, so very far-reaching in its impact.
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Um so, you know, to to give you some examples, uh as an organization, we work with um you know, aerospace, automotive, uh finance, pharmaceutical, chemical, semiconductor, materials companies.
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So, you know, broad uh spectrum uh of of companies that that we work with.
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What are you most excited about, Jeremy, out of all those examples you've given?
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What what are the most exciting use cases and and the ones that can come first?
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So, I'm very excited about um very excited about energy, uh sustainability, uh health care, and agriculture, which, you know, all kind of uh coincide a bit together.
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And I'll pick a I'll I'll pick one of my uh examples that I like because um you know, it it matters and I think it's interesting and it's concrete.
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So, with Boehringer Ingelheim, uh big German pharmaceutical company, we've been working on the um the problem of P450.
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Uh and I'm sure many of your listeners, like me, uh prior to this work ha- ha- had never heard of P450.
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That's an enzyme in our bodies that's responsible for metabolizing something like 75% of uh all therapeutic drugs.
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And we don't know how it works.
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So, you can imagine that that's pretty problematic for the drug drug discovery process to not understand how the enzyme that in all likelihood is going to uh metabolize that drug is going to function, if it's going to function safely, you know, what the byproducts are, and so forth.
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And a big part of the reason that we don't understand how it works is we can't simulate it on any conventional computer uh that we have today, nor in any conventional computer that we could ever build.
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And um some of my colleagues generated some numbers that would su- take something like 10 to the power of 100 years on a conventional uh GPU uh system to solve that simulation problem, whereas it would take minutes on a quantum computer to solve.
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So, that's to the point of taking something that's absolutely impossible.
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So, many, many, many ages of the universe is impossible uh into minutes.
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uh into minutes. And you can immediately start to infer, well, that's just one very specific problem across a multitude of problems just within the drug discovery process uh where you'd have a huge uh impact and similar applications um you know, we're working with Lockheed
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Martin in aerospace applications, uh with it's similarly with Airbus on computational fluid dynamics, Mercedes-Benz on battery chemistry, so new uh better batteries, with Mitsubishi Chemical on um new energy-efficient materials, JPMorgan on uh financial service use cases, and so on. So, you can see it's very broad uh
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So, you can see it's very broad uh and then within that breadth, you know, if you take a a a particular industry, it's also often very deep.
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So, that's a great segue, I think, to your vision for PsiQuantum.
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But just before we we dive into that, maybe to summarize, classical computers, as we know them, rely on classical physics um and and have been a fantastic tool, obviously, for for the world.
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What you're trying to build, a quantum computer, goes a bit of a level deeper and simulates quantum physics, which is a world where, I guess, multiple states can be true at the same time.
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So, just a couple quick things on on your summary there, which was perfect.
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Classical is just an annoying word, but that's what physicists mean.
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You know, so we we adopt, you know, classical physics means physics uh you know, uh of more than, you know, 125 years ago, essentially.
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Um which is Newtonian physics, you know, the physics that describes the world that we experience, essentially, we call classical uh uh physics strictly um uh you know, general relativity is also classical theory, but that doesn't matter too much.
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Um And and and I prefer the word conventional.
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So, a conventional computer is just a computer as we know them to be.
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Physicists will call it a classical computer, conventional computer.
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And then you mentioned that a a quantum computer can simulate um uh quantum physics, and indeed it is uh it is very good at simulating quantum physics.
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And indeed, uh you know, chemistry in many ways is applied quantum physics, and so that's an area of chemistry, materials, and so on.
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of chemistry, materials, and so on. But there's also more to more to it than that, and it the the way uh to describe it, I would say, is that um it is understood that of all the computational problems that are out
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there, of all the things that you could think about trying to compute, a subset of them can be efficiently computed on a conventional computer, and a subset can be another different subset can be efficiently computed on a quantum computer, and that second set subsumes the first one. So, there's a bigger set of
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So, there's a bigger set of computational problems that you can uh solve on a on a uh on a quantum computer than you can on a conventional computer.
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And indeed, you know, sorry for the for the uh delay here, but to to to segue into your your question, uh and PsiQuantum's approach is very much built on that understanding and then a very hard look at what would it take to actually solve problems that are really important with a quantum computer.
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A quantum computer is um uh to some extent, it's necessarily uh prone to errors in ways that a conventional computer is not.
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So, one of the miracles of a conventional computer is that it is digital.
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Um and that means there are just two states uh that, you know, each of those transistors are encoding.
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And um so, if if there's, you know, if if there's if the transistor wanders a bit away from uh its low voltage or its high voltage that encodes the two states say then you can easily you know latch it back to the right the right state so big feature of the power of of conventional computing and its pervasiveness in the world is that it's that it's digital such that the error rate in you know in
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the in the in our laptops and phones and so on is incredibly incredibly low and you don't need to worry much about error correction that's not true in some memory cases but for CPUs and GPUs and so on You've got quite a unique approach
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right to trying to solve this fault tolerance which is leveraging photonics which you feel quite strongly is the only plausible route to building a million cubit error corrected systems. Maybe explain a bit why you chose that
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Maybe explain a bit why you chose that approach over all the other potential approaches to quantum.
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approaches to quantum. Yeah so um so the the first thing is that um a quantum computer unlike a conventional computer is in some sense it's a hybrid digital and analog system in the sense that when you measure a cubit you measure a zero or
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one so that's just familiar from your bits and transistors which are um uh which are a digital but it's also analog in the sense that that cubit prior to its measurement can take a continuum of values something like a continuum of values between zero and one using this language or so on. So
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and one using this language or so on. So that analog feature makes errors you know uh uh intrinsically a challenge for quantum computing and the idea is exactly the same as let's you know radiation hardening conventional computer chip which is that you use redundancy and it turns out that uh in a quantum computer for any type of
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quantum computer that you build you need a lot of redundancy you need of order 10,000 physical cubits to encode each logical error corrected and therefore useful cubit so 10,000 10,000 to one uh and so if you you if you do some quick arithmetic you quickly convince yourself that you need about a hundred logical error corrected cubits and therefore you
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need about a million physical cubits before you can do anything of real value and that's what we found at PsiQuantum was that understanding that yeah you really need to reach to a million cubits before you can really solve important problems um and so we sort of worked backwards from there so if if you know real value comes
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when you have million plus cubit systems well the only way that we could see and I mean for 25 plus years the only way that we could see that that was going to be achievable was by leveraging the semiconductor industry you know the industry that back to the start of our conversation yeah routinely makes billions of chips per year with billions of components on
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each chip right like that manufacturing capability is really second to none and I sometimes provoke people by saying it makes every other human activity look a bit like scrabbling around in the mud with sticks and stones I mean it's truly technical people should be wowing themselves on a periodic basis again reminding themselves how miraculous it
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is that humans traveled up an exponential curve for you know the better part of a a century to create this incredible capability in manufacturing that you know we we have taken for granted for you know 50 50 some uh years and of course it took you know by some count trillions of dollars and the better part of a century and some of the smartest minds of the planet to achieve
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that capability so for us that was step zero right like you have to you have to be leveraging that and not just the chip part of it but the whole associated um supply chain and contract manufacturers and so on the same organizations that turn you know Nvidia GPUs into hundred thousand uh cluster uh supercomputers today right like all
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of that you know wiring the whole thing up and so on that's and so you know we were at that for a very long time and then we believe believe you know around a decade ago that we had uncovered a path where that would be possible uh using photonics I know you're very excited about how quantum can be a silver bullet in the fight against climate change. What why is it
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What why is it potentially so powerful on climate?
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Yeah well firstly quick quick sort of caveat and caution I'm I'm very careful to explain that um you know I I I I don't want people to think that there are silver bullets for solving climate change I want people to think that there's you know we've got to
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do everything all at the same time starting yesterday because that's what we need to do and I also uh I also think it's important that people understand that we've had the technology to solve climate change for decades what we've lacked is the
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you know the political social economic will to implement those changes cuz they're not you know they're not easy and they're not simple and so on and so the role of technology in general is to lessen that if not turn it around right like to make it more economically
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uh favorable so that's just sort of the generic role of technology and then yeah quantum computing could have a really powerful impact across you know I mentioned that battery chemistry uh but you know whether it's next generation solar cells based on
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perovskite materials that are you know cheaper and more efficient um hydrogen production ammonia production even steel and cement production so on I mean this this is like most of these challenges that we face in you know in energy transition in sustainability in
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fact in our human activity on the planet is a result of not really being able to do that chemistry and materials that is the underpinning foundations of it all I'm I'm in the habit of provoking uh you know professors of chemistry and
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anyone else who wants to listen with the claim that we can't actually start to do chemistry until we have a quantum computer it's designed to be provocative but also true in the sense that if you can't simulate the building blocks of the world you find around you
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like P450 never mind the building blocks of the world that you want to engineer like you know perovskite solar cells or catalysts for you know every industrial process that we currently pursue you know perovskite solar cells you name it what are you doing? I think that's an
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I think that's an important insight for people because I mean many people think that AI is going to do something similar for for what you just described for chemistry whether it's for drug discovery or novel materials.
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materials. We've backed a company here in the UK called Casper AI very exciting doing you know AI for novel materials but you would argue that AI sort of approximates chemistry whereas the quantum computers simulate
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it at a fundamental level and therefore you're going to be able to have a type of discovery that AI will not be able to at some point it will run against the wall Some people would disagree with that and say that AI is improving exponentially
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>> I totally agree with that totally agree with your description there and it's important it's a really important one um I think and probably of interest to a bunch of uh your listeners I'm sure is to understand this you know AI and quantum computing and what's that all
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about and to elaborate a little bit on what you said AI in general is a tool that takes vast quantities of data and infers and makes predictions on the basis of that data by you know seeing patterns that no human could hope to see or etc. right? right?
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um and those and the output is an approximation that depends on the you know on the the the exact details of the data so if you're a drug discovery company you might be getting some some some good early wins with AI now by taking the
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vast quantities of data that you have on molecules that you've synthesized and measured properties of predicting new molecules but you because it's you know that the answer is is is a only an approximation you can't be completely confident that that
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predicted molecule will really have the properties that the AI is telling you that it will have and so ultimately you'll have to go and synthesize that molecule and measure it which is time consuming and expensive on
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the other hand a quantum computer as you said in some sense does the opposite not that there's really an opposite of that but in some sense does the opposite which is it takes no data it does an exact first principles calculation of for example that that
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prediction of the of the AI so um you know let's take that molecule and do an exact first principles calculation of some property of it and confirm or otherwise that that prediction and I can have extreme confidence in that because it is an
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exact first principles calculation it's sort of generating you know effectively perfect data in silico and so you can already start to see how these things will work together because obviously now I can start to think okay well the experimental data that I've got
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I can test it check with with a quantum computer that it's useful I can start to generate data that spans a much much bigger space of you know molecules that we've never synthesized before we'd never even had the chance to can start to restrict
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things by you know containing particular elements or whatever it is and so on um and so you can see how these things are incredibly powerful independently and then even more powerful in operating in tandem with with one another. Everyone's very excited about
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Everyone's very excited about the impact of AI in the world.
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Do you think quantum will have a bigger or smaller impact on the economy and on humanity than AI?
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Quantum computing has has some features and some differences.
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I would say it's similarities with AI where it's also very pervasive, right?
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Like it will also be very pervasive.
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So very broad and very deep.
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Um predominantly it's going to be in the back end.
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A little bit like you know semiconductor chip manufacturing, right?
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Where not many of us are making semiconductor chips, but boy are our lives affected by that.
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Whereas AI, you know, it's affecting things in the back end, but we're also engaging with it as as individuals um as well.
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I think that ultimately quantum computing is going to have a have a bigger impact because of that fundamental fact that without it, you know, I I sometimes quote my um uh my my colleague Mike Nielsen who uh is you know formerly a professor of of
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physics and wrote the textbook and the reference book all in one on you know quantum computing who uh who says if we were to ever meet aliens no comment about whether they're out there to be met or if they are what the probability that we'd meet them is. If
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If we were to ever meet them, we already know something about them which is that they're using quantum computers.
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Now this is a very you know measured individual not prone to hyperbole and etc.
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So why would he make such a crazy claim?
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And the reason that he he does is because there's a sense in which humans without quantum computers are stuck in this small corner of what the universe or the laws of physics, however you want to think about it, enables across mathematics, physics, chemistry, materials and so on.
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So ultimately that that unlock is is truly um is truly profound um and we we we already see how that's you know, I've given you just a few examples uh of how we see that unfolding in some really important domains like the energy transition, like you know our own health um and so it goes. Yeah.
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And Jeremy, we we had one guest on Giant Ideas Mike Maples, the very successful venture capitalist.
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And his advice to founders and to investors actually was you got to be living in the future.
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You've been living in the future for 25 years building quantum.
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And I guess the the future you were living in has now become the present.
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But you do have a an inside view onto the future of the world with quantum, which I think is going to profoundly change things.
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And I don't think people are watching it probably closely enough because everyone's attention is on AI.
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But we've got this quantum boom coming.
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We've got a boom we're living through already with AI.
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Do you think we're about to enter a world of unimaginable abundance and wealth and societal pioneering developments?
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How kind of optimistic does this make you?
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I I'm I'm extremely optimistic.
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Uh partly by nature and partly by you know sort of rational analysis of of of things.
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And I think you're right that um you know, AI is unfolding right now.
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And I think the world is is probably underprepared for uh the imminent arrival of utility scale quantum computing.
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So these million qubit scale systems um and as you know, there's a lot of organizations you know, nations etc.
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out there who felt like AI took them a bit by surprise.
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Um now you and many of your listeners will have been engaging with AI for a decade or two ahead of chat GPT.
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And I think that's often the feature again of emerging technologies is that they're emerging And then suddenly they appear and I feel like that's sort of what's happening.
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That's what happened with AI and I think that's what's happening right now with quantum computing is that yeah, I mean I've been you know at it for you know quarter of a century or more um and and you know, people have been hearing about it and so on and this you know, but and then suddenly it happens.
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And so I think that preparation thing is really important.
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And I think it's important because the impact is so you know, it's like the the problems that we can tackle uh are so important across you know, energy uh health care agriculture, you name it, right?
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Like we need to urgently do things differently.
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And so I think getting prepared for that is at firstly, there's some technical work to do.
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There's obviously also some supply chain and business and so on.
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And and there's an urgency to do it.
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And then sort of you know, to get at your question in in a bit more detail.
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Like if you want to if you want to imagine a post scarcity world.
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So a world where um you know, our our energy and and food and materials construction wasn't a big part of human activity, right?
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Like at the moment that's the main part of our economy obviously.
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Um in a world where that was a small part of what humans uh did that world it's it's a bit like the the aliens with quantum computers.
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Kind of hard to imagine that world without a quantum computer.
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And it becomes pretty easy to imagine with a quantum computer where you know, suddenly you have let's say mastery over over physics and chemistry and materials and so on where and by the way, I always appeal to Mother Nature or whatever uh however you like to think about the natural world where you know, we humans use the same chemistry set as Mother Nature.
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And we sometimes fall into the mistake of thinking that we you know, we're very advanced and we have all these great things that we can do. I don't know.
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Like when I look out the window and I see the natural world, I see structures growing from small seeds that drop from the neighboring structure where all the material in it is harvested locally, where all the energy is harvested locally, where when bits fall off it they grow. You know what I mean?
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Like this should this should be inspirational for us to think about how the world could be if we were even a fraction as as adept as Mother Nature is at doing chemistry and all of the associated things.
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And in fact, we should be able to imagine doing better.
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That's an exciting future to to to imagine.
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Can we get specific on timelines cuz quantum, a bit like fusion, is always famously 10 years away.
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And it's having a real moment, you know, you know, right now.
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Companies like Rigetti in the public stock markets, huge valuations.
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But what is your best guess on when this future will actually arrive for people?
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Yeah, so you know, I can speak only for our our organization.
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And I can say that you know, we're bringing online those um uh million qubit scale systems in just a handful of years.
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And that's why I really see the urgency.
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And indeed that is driving a lot of our work with our customers and partners to really do the do the hard work that that needs to needs to be done to utilize those things for all of these applications that that we've talked >> And what's the blocker right now?
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If you could raise a hundred billion dollars tomorrow from nation states would this supercomputer that you're building be be live and ready to go?
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What's yeah, what's blocking the the future being here today?
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So so for for us at PsiQuantum, there there there essentially isn't a blocker in the sense that you know, the we we spent a lot of time on the scientific part before we founded the company.
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I mean I give you the short history of PsiQuantum, 20 years of university research to figure out a path where whereby we could leverage the semiconductor industry to make a quantum computer.
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And then we spent you know, several years and several hundred million dollars getting into that industry because you know, tier one semiconductor manufacturing fabs aren't in the business of doing you know, small research projects with little startups or so on.
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And then we spent a whole bunch more time and money.
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So the balance of you know, a decade and a billion dollars let's say to be at the point where we're mass manufacturing the chips that go into data center like facilities that we're building in in Australia and in Chicago.
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Um and as I said, they're data center like facilities.
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So you know, to first order they look a bit you know, big big building with a you know, bunch of uh cabinets in that are a bit like the 19-in racks.
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All of them are filled with silicon chips and so on.
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That that takes time to build.
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And so that's where we're at now.
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You know, we're building those things.
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We we broke ground at that site in Chicago um uh in September.
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Uh and so you know, work is underway building them.
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So yeah, it's it's very exciting.
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And we're we're building the infrastructure at the same time as finalizing the technology that goes into them that you know, everything arrives.
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And at the same time as we're working with all of these customers and partners to identify the highest impact problems that will run on those very first systems.
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So it's it's it's very much um exciting times.
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So we like to end the Giant Ideas segment of the podcast with a little bit of future gazing.
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So what is something that you believe strongly about the future that almost no one agrees with you on?
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I don't know that almost no one agrees with me, but I I think it's bright.
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I think there's a there's a very bright future by which I mean you know, there's a lot of things that can cause people sleepless nights.
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cause people sleepless nights. um uh at the moment uh and I think a lot of people are prone to that, you know, worrying about things, but you know, I I just see uh so much opportunity and and potential uh in the future um and you know, I think we are at the at the beginning of very interesting um very interesting journey as a as a species um you know, I think we've had you know, maybe fits and starts as far
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as uh civilization goes and we've had a you know, pretty sustained um uh you know, modern civilization with increasing kind of increasing on all dimensions of of human activity, whether it's you know, moral philosophy or
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technological capability or scientific understanding um and so yeah, I think I think if we sustain all of that uh and expe- >> [music] >> if we continue on doing all of those things um then I think there's a bright future. Amazing. That's all of you at Amazing.
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That's all of you at Giant Ventures and what a wonderful and optimistic note to end on. >> [music]