*Laughs*

you know, the magic computers that are going to break all encryption

and beat everyone at their own game and be the next big thing and be on all our smartphones.

Should we put some reality on this? Where are we at with quantum computing?

I Work at a company called Righetti computing. We're a company in Berkeley, California

And we build quantum computers from the ground up. We do the silicon fabrication all the way up to how we program the machines

I in particular

Think a lot about how we program the machines how we interface with it at some point

Somebody has to type something into a keyboard to make it do something and that's mostly where I think about things quantum computers

Really should be thought of as a way to

Augment our existing compute infrastructure exists in computers solve problems, and that's not going away there. They will continue to solve good problems

So a quantum computer really should be thought of as a is a special-purpose machine that can solve certain problems

a lot better

Than existing computers can solve them. In fact, I think thinking of it like a GPU is is pretty fruitful that

GPUs are, are, they are computers in a sense. But really they're they're better thought of as like a coprocessor to your main computer. They

GPUs are extremely good at solving a variety of problems

you could sort of

Wrangle a GPU to solve any problem you want to but it's you know regular computers are good at that so quantum computers

I think of as like on the side

Unfortunately current quantum computers are gigantic. They're they you know, they're like the old computers like the ENIAC they fill a room

But nonetheless you you hook your computer up to this and it does separate problem-solving as a company

We build these quantum computers and deploy them there. They're

Accessible right now on the cloud. There's something that I on my laptop anywhere

Actually, I don't need any special interface can connect up to them and do computations with them

And we're at a point now where?

the fundamental unit of resource of a quantum computer just as we take regular computers and think about them in terms of

bits and gigabytes and so on on a quantum computer

These are measured in qubits, which are very special because every time you add a qubit

You're you're doubling the capacity of the computer in some way. So

Last year, we released a machine that has around eight qubits. And now the current machine we have is about nineteen qubits

so it's not that we

Approximately just doubled the qubit because each qubit itself is doubling

so you have to think of that number of doublings each time from eight to nineteen problems that deal with lots of

interactions or lots of

Possibilities so to speak are where quantum computer sort of shine

so one big area of application is

in quantum computing is the simulation of molecules molecules are are made up of a bunch of atoms and each of these atoms is is

Applying a force to the other atoms they're pushing and pulling each other and they're just lots of ways in which the atoms interact with

one another and a quantum computer is extremely good at

Keeping track of all that and dealing with that in a very efficient way that classical computers which are normal computers

Don't deal with quite as well

Likewise other types of problems like optimization which in mathematics means kind of finding the best or worst

possible solution to a problem

Quantum computers are showing a lot of promise and with that said though

There's one point I want to make which is sort of in popular science people think that quantum computers just sort of try every possibility

At the same time you get all these sort of kooky

Interpretations of multiple universes and so on and quantum computers, don't do that. They do not try every possibility at the same time

But the second point is that applications of quantum computing is a very active field of research

quantum computers currently are

They're called noisy quantum computers. They they sort of act like analog devices not digital devices

And so there's all this a little bits of error and little bits of noise that come into the system

and so it's an active field of research to see what

Algorithms and what problems are very robust to this noise and it turns out that this molecular simulation is an example of a problem

That's very robust to noise

Whereas what? You might heard of like Shor's algorithm and factoring and breaking encryption are not robust annoys at all

They're very difficult to to do so that's a very active field of research both at the company that I work at

As well as more broadly the community the sort of room size computers are sort of where we're at

the way in which these computers have been constructed is

Using sort of off-the-shelf components that have not been specially made for the construction of that machine in general

So you find generally with these quantum computers you find big racks of analog

electronics these electronics that that have existed for other applications

and so

It's definitely not at a point where we've we've sort of custom fabricated the entirety of the machine

I'm not just talking about the quantum chip itself

But the thing that the quantum chip is housed in the electronics that go with the quantum chip, etc, etc

We're only just starting

We just in general as a in the field of quantum computation are only just starting to make like customized

electronics and the like for these systems

The other aspect of this is that just like the ENIAC for example

Which had vacuum tubes that burnt out and you had to go replace them

Literal bugs getting in there and so on neither of those things happen with quantum computers

But what does happen is that the system in general isn't shown to be stable across, you know?

Five or ten years and just hasn't existed that long

And so components are are often swapped out often changed

It's not robust to changes in the environment

like if somebody walks by with a big magnet the whole thing kind of goes awry, so it's a really sort of

Finicky machine not unlike the early computers like the ENIAC and so on

How far are we off quantum smartphones?

Yeah, that is that is really really far away because we need to cool these chips down to like the same temperature or colder than

The temperature of outer space so you need big refrigerators as they're called

Not going to happen for a good while

The interesting thing though is

When we have multiple qubits, and this is really where the power of quantum computation happens

We can actually think of it sort of simply

Diagrammatically that if qubits if I just represent them sort of as a circle here, maybe we have three the idea

Is that these qubits can interact this guy can interact with this guy?