Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
https://youtu.be/s2h-16Ia-Pk
Matt and Sean talk about quantum computing … and when do we talk about what we don’t yet have?
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why The Race for Quantum Supremacy Just Got Real https://youtu.be/L1kyvI2m6UY?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about quantum computing … and when do we talk about what we don’t yet have?
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why The Race for Quantum Supremacy Just Got Real https://youtu.be/L1kyvI2m6UY?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
★ Support this podcast ★
Creators and Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
Sean Ferrell: In this episode of Still to Be Determined, we're going to talk about what we talk about when we talk about quantum computing. Welcome everybody, to Still to be Determined. This is of course the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And here on Still to Be Determined, we follow up on his episodes and dive a little deeper, both into the comments and into the topic at hand. This week we're going to be discussing Matt's most recent Why the race for Quantum supremacy just got real. This is an episode from August 5, 2025. Hi everybody, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm Matt's older brother. I am a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some stuff for kids and I'm just generally curious about tech. And luckily for me and my brother, is that Matt? We welcome now to that Matt. Hey, Matt.
Matt Ferrell: Hi, Sean. How you doing?
Sean Ferrell: I'm doing okay. Just a word of not warning, but just kind of setting the context. Our recording schedule has been thrown off this week, so we are not recording on a normal day. What does that mean to me you're wondering? Well, me, let me tell you. Normally we like to start off our conversations talking about our most recent episode of this podcast. So we dive into the comments on recent episode of Still to Be Determined and we share those comments and have a brief back and forth around that before we dive into Matt's most recent. This week, that ain't so possible because we're recording far too close to the drop date, which means there are a couple of comments and they are fun and funny. But there really aren't that many comments for us to be able to say, here's what Mark said, here's what John said, here's what Debbie said, here's what it's mainly just, okay, they think we're handsome men, so we're not going there. On now to our conversation about Matt's most recent. This is, as mentioned just moments ago, why the race for quantum supremacy just got real. And Matt, there was a lot of conversation around where's the meat?
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: And I want us to start off with like, what meat was there that people were saying? But I don't like the taste of that because I'm not supposed. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. Like this one from Sinister184 who said, we're expending massive amounts of resources to solve unsolvable problems, but what good is that when we can't fix big problems that we already have easy answers for. I think Sinister is referring to things like, I mean, big picture. The simplest way for me to boil down what I think he's talking about is the rejection of science in general. The things that science is telling us are going on today. And those things are rejected for a variety of reasons, some of which are worldview, some of which are lack of willing to grapple with difficult choices, some of which might be political or economic in nature. And so, yeah, why spend time and resources looking at quantum computing if things like climate change or sustainable energy production seem to be debated and pushed back on so, so hard?
Matt Ferrell: Sean, you're asking kind of a million dollar question.
Sean Ferrell: It is an enormous question.
Matt Ferrell: My personal take on this, I'm not cynical. That's not who I am in nature.
Sean Ferrell: So it's like we're back to the half full glass conversation, which we've had a couple of times in the past month.
Matt Ferrell: Yes. But also there's this for me, I feel like we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can do multiple things at once and one doesn't, one thing doesn't discount another. So I don't share that worldview that's kind of emanating from this comment. I see where Sinister is coming from, but at the same time, this problem that's being, trying to be solved, is it unsolvable? I don't know. I'll tell you now, Sinister, you don't know. It's like none of us know, but we have to try to figure it out to see if it is solvable. If it is solvable. Quantum computers unlock the ability to answer questions that we can't answer today yet because we don't have the way to calculate it and figure it out efficiently. Yeah, it's going to be able to unlock new things for us that could solve some of these big problems that you're talking about right now. But at the same time, we do have solutions to a lot of the big problems we have and we're just not doing them. So. I get where you're coming from, Sinister. I feel, I feel your pain. Yeah. But I don't know what the answer to this is, but for me personally, it's. I do believe we have to keep striving to learn more about the world around us, even though there's things pushing back on that from different directions.
Sean Ferrell: In the same vein as what Sinister brings up in their comment, there were other people. Two tracks that I want to follow right now, one being, well, you're setting up a, like the conversation you had in your video around this quantum experiment solved an equation that another computer, a supercomputer that exists today, would have taken more time than the history of the universe to answer. There were people in the comments saying, well, that doesn't make sense because that equation was designed specifically to stymie those computers. So how is that a valuable lesson? The other track, right, is in one of the comments, somebody reframed your conversation in the video along the lines of saying, this is analogous to the space race. And I liked that comment very much. And I think both of those tie in to Sinister's comment. It's almost like Sinister's comment becomes the root that those two come out of. Because on the one hand, it's okay, we're setting up hurdles that can only be achieved by something that we're trying to build, and then we're using the proof of its ability to do that thing as proof that we're on the right track. But are we just, like, diluting ourselves in some way? And the other being, again, Sinister's comment, we've got these problems over here. Why are we going chasing butterflies over here? But are we, in fact, in the midst of something like the space race, where when the space race was taking place, the world was struggling mightily with any number of massive issues? We've talked in just Matt and I recently in another podcast that we do that's related to the TV show Star Trek and history and looking at what that era, when the original series was being made was like. One of the things we keep seeing are headlines in the news during those dec. During that decade of the 60s, they were trying to put men on the moon.
And at the same time, Vietnam was escalating. Those two things happening at the same time. Well, where should your resources have been going? What might you have done differently? But that's how the world works. And Matt's comment of walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time, I think kind of touches on that.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: So I guess the. The first track that I'd point us back to is the idea of setting up questions that only our hypothetical thing can solve in order to prove that our hypothetical thing can be a thing. Is that unfair? I don't think it's unfair. So, yeah, go ahead and.
Matt Ferrell: Well, it's not unfair because that's what these computers are designed to do. They're quantum computers. It's in quantum science. They can answer things in that quantum realm that current computers can't conceivably do. That's the whole point of a quantum computer, it can do things the other computer can't do. It does not mean you'll be running Doom on a quantum computer at any point. Because guess what, a silicon one and zero style computer is way better at that. So it's like one is not going to supplant the other. You're not going to have a quantum computer in your living room that your family gathers around to use to surf the web. That is not what quantum computers will ever be used for. That's not what they're good at. That's not what they can do. So it's like a silicon based computer can calculate things way faster than a quantum computer in a certain realm. So it'd be like, oh, you're only giving the answers, the questions to the silicon computer because it's good at what it's good at doing. Yeah, that's the whole point. It's like a screwdriver or a hammer. What tool are you going to use? It's like we've got the screwdriver already with the silicon based computers and here's quantum computers, which is a new hammer. We're figuring out how to use it, what it's good at, what it can actually do. That's kind of the whole point of all of this. So to say that we're giving it a question that it can calculate, that only it can answer is like, yes, that's precisely why that's the whole point. So for me, I have trouble kind of. It clearly comes across as. I don't think people are quite clicking in on the difference here. And from my video, I'm 100% to blame to that. I should have made that extra clear of like quantum computers are good at X, they're never going to do Y. This is why you feed in the question that gives them for X. So it's.
I should have probably made that more clear. There's other videos I've seen online that have done similar. I can't remember what her name was. It wasn't Sabine. Sabine's done a couple of videos on quantum computers that are really interesting. But there was another creator I came across that had a fantastic video delving into why quantum computers are kind of like they're these specialty computers that can't do everything and it comes to the software. It's some of the issues that I brought up about how software is the key here. She did a really good job explaining that at a really deep scientific level. And it would, I would almost want to direct people to her and say.
Sean Ferrell: Maybe find a link to her video and drop it in the show notes so that people can follow through on that if you're interested in taking a look at a deeper dive. So, yeah. And then back to the walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time. Or not only should you not put your eggs in one basket, nobody is actively able to put all the eggs in one basket when it comes to how complex the world is and a team of researchers working on one thing or a major corporation. The names in this video are all the big, big corporations that, for better or worse, are looming over us every minute of the day. The idea that Amazon and Microsoft might be looking into these things is not a surprise to anybody. So I would say the moral imperative of this.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I was gonna say, for me, the fact that Amazon's in this conversation still makes me go, huh?
Sean Ferrell: I mean, come on, they're all, so. They're trying to launch people into space. I mean, it's like this, this is no longer just a, like, we want to sell you books company. So it starts to, it starts to rub up against the questions of, like, how do we understand. Not looking for a defense, but how do we explain to ourselves that, yeah, this is not, it's not unexpected that people would be diving off into this kind of theoretical mind shaft when there are other things in the world that seem more imperative. Like, to me, it seems part of how humanity has always worked. And it's not surprising to me that there's. There are people off there saying, like, let's, hey, let's follow this trail deep into our belly button while other people are saying, hey, there are people struggling over here who need help. And that's sadly, I mean, for better or worse, that's part of history as well. So, like, kind of contextualizing it in that way. What do you see when you see this kind of research and see comments from people saying, what about the problems? What about the issues that people are struggling with right now?
Matt Ferrell: Well, kind of going back to my previous career before I did YouTube, working in the software industry, working in the tech sector, I worked with immensely talented software and computer engineers. And there's a mindset that I always saw in the best people in whatever industry you're talking about that are, they want to solve big problems. They get excited and jazzed when there's a problem in front of them that nobody solved before. Like how it's like, we're going to blaze a new trail. We're going into a frontier nobody's been before. We're seeing that right now with software engineers that work in AI. It's like some companies are having trouble hiring the best talent because that company may not be seen as a leader in the field. And you could say Apple. It's like they deliver, they believe in delivering products, not necessarily doing bleeding edge research and development. So companies like Google might get the better talent because they're seen as spending more money and time on R and D. And there's certain mindsets of people that want to solve those big problems that have never been done before because they want to blaze a trail and do something new and exciting and it gets them up in the morning so they can get excited to go to work. So it's not a time to make the donuts kind of attitude. And then there's a bunch of people out there that are perfectly happy doing that. Like, I don't need to blaze a new trail. I just want to have a job, have my family, do my stuff. And so it's like is where I come back to walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Just because a company's investing a certain amount of money investing into quantum computer research and there's a small group of people that are just deeply invested in that does not mean that there's not millions of other people that are not working hard to make solve the big problems we have today, because that is absolutely happening. So for me it's, I understand the mindset of the people that are wanting to work in these fields and are pushing these envelopes because it's the new frontier, it's the new world. You get excited about it. It's like what makes you excited to do your job, that's what makes them get up and do their job, is that this is exciting to them. So I don't fault them for that at all.
Sean Ferrell: Wanted to shift to a different angle of this, which is mentioning again the big player names. Jim Herman jumped into the comments and said, IBM, they are rated as the leader in quantum computing, but you left out the leader. And a response to that from Malin Morris was, well, I see there was a tip of the hat to IBM at the 9 minute 32 second mark. But IBM wasn't in this recent wave of announcements, I guess. So was there a reason for IBM not being here? Was it simply, yeah, these three that you talked about had recent issues that they were like, hey, look at what we did and IBM is just quietly doing other stuff in the background?
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I would say IBM's not doing stuff quietly. They are undisputedly considered the leader. But where I would kind of push back on that mentality is if you look at everybody that's doing stuff, there is no universal leader like IBM is leading in certain, is leading in more like subcategories than anybody else. But there is nobody that's like just dominating. But IBM is 100% leading the charge here. The reason they weren't focused on this video is that was not the point of the video. It was more of, well, here's Amazon puts out this announcement and literally a week later Google comes out with this. And literally like two weeks later Microsoft says, huh, well we got this. It was just like, why all of the sudden are all of these major players and all three that I talked focused on in this video are major players in this? Why are all of these advancements happening around the hardware right now? Like what, what caused this to kind of become a thing right now? That's what was the motivation behind the video. And IBM wasn't part of that major new wave of big look at me, look at me, look at me. So that's part of the reason why they weren't the main focus. Um, if I was going to do a video that was just talking about like what's the current, like who's the current leader? IBM would be front and center part of the conversation in that video. 100%. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: So in that vein, I think anytime there's a major breakthrough, you end up in any technology. There's the initial, well, you have the leader and they get a leg up on everybody else. And then there's a question of, well, do you get some also rans that drop out? Do you get a competitor that comes in and emulates? Do you get a competitor that comes in with a very different model? I think one easy to use analogy would be you can look at computers. Eventually a computer model did solidify around how digital computers would be built and work. And then there was a kind of fracturing of how you design those components through different companies that would take a different approach to how a processor was built. But ultimately there was a, a single kind of, well, this is what our computers will look like with some attempts to push boundaries in different directions. Do you think that that's going to happen with quantum computing? Do you think that there is going to be one of these companies will crack the nut and get such a leg up that it will effectively define how quantum computing looks? Or do you think that the various players continue to push in R and D? I know it's impossible for you to speculate what Amazon might do if Microsoft creates the first actual marketable quantum computer. But might there be such a difference in the mindset of how they're getting there that you could have multiple versions all kind of bubbling along as they achieve these targets?
Matt Ferrell: I think this is going to follow a pattern we see in all tech development that we've seen before. And I think your analogy is really good with the PCs that we take for just in our everyday lives. You have how many major chip makers were there in the world like in the early 2000s? You're talking basically Intel and maybe AMD and now we've got TM TS, TSMC is basically like the largest chip maker in the world right now. So it's like there's only a handful of them that are really kind of like dominating the chip space. But there is an endless supply of software and things that you can layer on top of this stuff. That's kind of what I see potentially happening in this realm where it's a bunch of these companies are focused heavily on hardware and as soon as somebody kind of cracks that nut for the hardware, it's going to be an arms race figuring out the software. We're seeing the same thing right now in AI, it's like ChatGPT. OpenAI is kind of like the de facto standard whenever you talk about AI, but there's Anthropic, there's xAI, there's like all these other companies that are doing it. But ChatGPT kind of like absorbed all the conversation. But what's interesting now is there are dozens of models out there that are just as good as each other. Like you're talking about like nickel and diming of like this one's a little better at this and this one's a little better at that. There's so many of them that it's almost kind of like eh, X has got Grok and ChatGPT, it's OpenAI's and Claude for Anthropic and there's Llama over here from Meta and like there's all these different language models. Now the arms race is kind of that software layer. It's the agents and the things that are being built on top of that as the underpinning to make really cool products and solve really interesting problems for our daily lives. That's where the arms race is.
I think the same thing is going to happen with quantum computers and we are quite a ways from that day. But it's like, I think once we get to a place where these chips start to actually perform well and have figured out the error correction and can do work reliably. There's going to be a couple of players that will become the leaders and then it's just going to be just crazy town for people trying to figure out software to kind of layer on top of these systems and build products out of it. That's going to be where the real lighting gasoline on fire kind of moment happens. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: And to go back again to both that and pulling in the idea that you mentioned earlier, nobody's going to be, hey kids, let's gather around the quantum computer in the living room and play Metal Gear Solid. As Kevin Fiddler points out in the comments, Kevin just writes a phrase, weather prediction models. Seriously, we need this. That's closer to what we're talking about, right? We're talking about. I saw something the other day that kind of made my eyes pop a bit when I saw it. And I was just like, well, of course. And it was somebody pointing out that there are AI tools being built for stock market manipulation, not prediction. Oh yeah, manipulation.
Matt Ferrell: Yep.
Sean Ferrell: And I'm like, okay, so here comes a quantum computer. Somebody's going to write a program that is going to be, okay, quantum computer, I want you to go in and control the market for me. Buying, selling at speeds that we won't be able to comprehend.
We won't be able to comprehend what it's doing, but it will do things to trigger things, to make things happen the way that somebody who writes that software wants. So there's a kind of malevolent design, but at the other end of the spectrum is the altruistic one, which is, yeah, weather prediction. We cannot process weather data accurately. But a predictive model built around quantum computing, which could say, well, the variables don't have to be on or off, they can be both at the same time. So here's what we think long term weather trends will look like. Might end up being a solution to some of the questions. Like, wouldn't it be nice to know a hurricane was coming two months in advance? Wouldn't it be great to know that the tornadoes warnings could be identified down to a specific county as opposed to an entire part of a state? So that's, that's the things that Kevin, I think is pointing toward. Can you think of any other areas where you're like, this would be of tremendous value? Medical research is, oh man.
Matt Ferrell: Climate science is the one I'm most interested in. But the second most thing I find interesting is drug research and health care. It's the same thing. It's like there's so many variables and the ways that each human body may react slightly different to a drug or a cancer treatment or whatever it is. Quantum computers could really help unlock diagnosing and finding new materials and chemistries for drugs that could help improve our lives and make us live longer and have a healthier lifespan. I mean, who wouldn't want that solving climate science issues, making us all healthier. It's like there's so many aspects to like material science and energy storage systems that could be kind of like boosted based from quantum computers being able to look into it. I know people are sick of AI, but again, quantum computers could really unlock machine learning and AI technology as well. Because all this kind of like, it's like a swirling mass in a cauldron that somebody's stirring up. It's all interrelated. But yeah, climate science and drugs in healthcare for me are the big ones.
Sean Ferrell: That's a sound bite that if taken out of context would be an incredibly damning phrase. So please nobody quotes that and put that out on the Internet. Matt Ferrell saying drugs. Yeah, that's what I'm excited about.
Matt Ferrell: I like drugs.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I like drugs and computers.
Matt Ferrell: I like drugs, Drugs and computers.
Sean Ferrell: So listeners, viewers, what do you think about all this? This has been an episode which has been a little more speculative in nature just because of the newness of both the topic itself, it's such a bleeding edge topic, but also because of the nature of when Matt's most recent episode dropped. So it was a little bit more of Matt and I just throwing things out there and having a chat. What do you think about all that? Where do you jump in in this conversation, jump into the comments and let us know? We look forward to reading that and sharing it in our next episode when we return back to our regular recording schedule and we're actually able to see comments. So thank you for that. Also, while you're doing that, don't forget to like subscribe, share with your friends. Those are all the very easy and free ways for you to support us. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to StillTBD.FM or click the join button on YouTube. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the quantum bruises and then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of admitting that we're excited by drugs and computers. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.