The Quantum Computing Moment: The Last Tech Frontier

Quantum computing is shaping up to be the next major technology after AI, especially in the wake of U.S. efforts to speed up development and prepare for quantum security threats.

So let's walk through the basics of qubits, the impact on encryption and Bitcoin, and the main companies and applications currently shaping the field.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Quantum’s Next Wave
3:04 How Qubits Break Encryption
6:35 Trump’s Quantum Executive Orders
9:31 Fault Tolerance Explained
12:11 IBM Enters the Race
15:47 Rigetti and D-Wave
18:33 Quantum’s AI Moment

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
I came across this post that asked the question, what comes after AI?

Josh:
And I was thinking to myself, AI has been my entire universe for a long time.

Josh:
What does actually come afterwards? And I thought robotics, we have space.

Josh:
We also have this thing called quantum computing. And I was like,

Josh:
huh, it's been a while since we've talked about quantum computing.

Josh:
What's going on there? It turns out the answer is quite a bit,

Josh:
starting with the president of the United States who just signed two executive orders,

Josh:
accelerating the rate of progress that we have around quantum computing,

Josh:
as well as personally taking the balance sheet of the United States of America

Josh:
and using it to invest privately in a few of these quantum companies.

Josh:
So this episode, we're going to unpack the quantum opportunity,

Josh:
what's going on, give you an update on the state of things, as well as where

Josh:
you can find optimal places to put your money in the case that you are bullish

Josh:
on quantum as a category and you think it is going to be one of the next upcoming trends.

Josh:
This, of course, none of this will be financial advice, although if you've been

Josh:
copy trading the president of the United States for a while,

Josh:
you've been doing pretty damn good. So that's what compelled us to want to make

Josh:
this episode. We were personally curious, and hopefully this curiosity can be

Josh:
shared with you guys who are listening and you can get something pretty positive out of it.

Ejaaz:
You know, it's so interesting. I've always thought of the United States government

Ejaaz:
as being like a customer of innovation.

Ejaaz:
So like they buy the rockets, they buy the weapons, they invest in the labs,

Ejaaz:
but they never actually take like an equity upside in any of these companies.

Ejaaz:
And recently they've been doing that with AI and now they're doing it with a

Ejaaz:
new technology, which is not technically new, but is coming into its kind of

Ejaaz:
like chat GPT type moment, which is quantum technology itself.

Ejaaz:
They signed two executive orders yesterday. One is focusing or directing federal

Ejaaz:
agencies to work very closely with the companies that are building this new

Ejaaz:
quantum technology, work with the academics and understand how this works with

Ejaaz:
the sole goal of building a quantum computer

Ejaaz:
by 2028, which supposedly is going to solve all our problems.

Ejaaz:
And then order number two is directing all the agencies, the governments,

Ejaaz:
the companies that exist and run the world today and the country of the United

Ejaaz:
States of America to harden their systems against potential quantum attacks.

Ejaaz:
Quantum computers, as we're going to explain in a short second,

Ejaaz:
could be used very maliciously if placed in the wrong hands.

Ejaaz:
Now, Josh, I know you've been looking into how these quantum computers work

Ejaaz:
and how they're different from classic computers.

Ejaaz:
But the way I understand it is it's very different from a classic computer.

Ejaaz:
Typically, a classic computer operates in bits. So it's either zero or it's either one.

Ejaaz:
And it's a bunch of zero and ones. And this computes a bunch of different algorithms,

Ejaaz:
which run on the AI chips that we speak about all the time on this show,

Ejaaz:
or any kind of software that you run on your app or on your phone or whatever that might be.

Ejaaz:
Now, the difference here is with the quantum computers, they have this thing

Ejaaz:
called qubits, which means that they could be a zero and a one at the same time.

Ejaaz:
So it's this weird thing called supervision. I don't know. Can you explain this?

Josh:
Yeah and and every state in between so it's basically not any state until it's

Josh:
observed and that state exists in this thing called the superposition which

Josh:
means it's both of them at the same time and both of them not at all it's this

Josh:
very weird concept drop your head around but applied to a practical sense,

Josh:
we are trying to create as many qubits as possible which you could think of

Josh:
as the modern-day equivalent of a bit but the futurized version and the thing

Josh:
that that unlocks because they exist in the superposition is.

Josh:
Is the interesting part. When you think about encryption, the thing that underlines

Josh:
all of the internet, everything digital, it's the way that we have privacy,

Josh:
it's the way that we have security that relies on this thing called prime number factorization.

Josh:
And basically it exists by multiplying two very large numbers together,

Josh:
but then reversing the process to figure out the numbers that were multiplied

Josh:
to get that large number is really difficult.

Josh:
And traditional computers have to spend millions to billions of years trying to decrypt that.

Josh:
And because it takes so long to do that they're incapable of decrypting standard

Josh:
login information for example when you type in your password it's encrypted

Josh:
using this prime factorization what quantum

Josh:
decryption can do because it has these qubits that exist in all these positions

Josh:
at once it can do this factorization math very quick and it can reverse the

Josh:
process of let's say a password that's been encrypted

Josh:
in a matter of seconds maybe even less so it it kind of breaks down the underlying

Josh:
security of the internet i guess we could say and that is one of many.

Josh:
Second order effects that happens from encryption.

Josh:
I think we have a lot of kind of progress to be made around biology,

Josh:
taking these large swats of data like we have with our DNA makeup and making

Josh:
sense of it. There's a lot of really interesting use cases and applications.

Josh:
It's just been difficult because we haven't been able to figure out these things

Josh:
called fault tolerant qubits, basically bits on a computer that work.

Josh:
And we're measuring these by the tens and the dozens.

Josh:
We're not talking about terabytes, which are trillions of bits, but we are on our way.

Josh:
So it very much feels like that very early stage of the exponential where

Josh:
we're back in the day we used to measure bits before we even got to a kilobit

Josh:
of information and then we got to a megabit and then terabit and then petabit

Josh:
and then we does the whole thing we're at the the bit stage where we can measure

Josh:
them individually instead of by the dozens or hundreds and

Josh:
That is where we're getting in now with this executive order and President Trump.

Josh:
He's buying real early into this exponential curve here.

Ejaaz:
And I think like, you know, you mentioned the number that were in the tens and

Ejaaz:
the dozens, and that might lead you to think that like we haven't made much progress at all.

Ejaaz:
But I was reading like, you know, if you had 300 of these qubits,

Ejaaz:
you could basically simulate every single atom in the universe,

Ejaaz:
theoretically. We're not quite there yet, but practically you could.

Ejaaz:
The other thing I was thinking about is, okay, if I'm listening to this and

Ejaaz:
I'm still confused by everything you just said, what are the main applications

Ejaaz:
that you could potentially use for a quantum computer that is supposedly going to be built in 2028?

Ejaaz:
Well, as I understand, there's two main applications. One is simulating molecules.

Ejaaz:
So in the sense of creating new drug discoveries where you can cure certain

Ejaaz:
ailments or cancers or whatever that might be, quantum computers theoretically

Ejaaz:
could fix this in a matter of hours if applied in the correct way.

Ejaaz:
But also So materials that we don't even know could exist today,

Ejaaz:
combinations of chemistries and compounds or whatever that might be,

Ejaaz:
can be solved by quantum computers.

Ejaaz:
So anything from a molecular simulation side of things can be resolved and solved

Ejaaz:
by a quantum computer once it's functionally accurate.

Ejaaz:
The second application is cryptography. Cryptography basically hardens every

Ejaaz:
security system in the entire world right now. It underpins.

Ejaaz:
It's the substrate behind Bitcoin and a lot of cryptographic security systems in the world.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you have a quantum computer, you can basically surpass or break through

Ejaaz:
this barrier, which is why executive order number two from Trump signed yesterday

Ejaaz:
basically said, hey, any like major system that runs and operates a bulk of the world's GDP today

Ejaaz:
needs to start preparing and becoming quantum resistant, including all the crypto

Ejaaz:
and blockchain types of stuff.

Ejaaz:
So I guess now's a good time to kind of get into what the executive orders are

Ejaaz:
and what they actually say.

Josh:
Yes, these two executive orders were just signed this week. Order one launches

Josh:
a national effort to produce a quantum computer capable of performing important

Josh:
scientific calculations.

Josh:
It also aims to develop quantum-enabled sensors and networks within the next

Josh:
five years. Okay, that seems pretty quick.

Josh:
Order number two directs federal agencies to transition their computer systems

Josh:
to quantum cryptography, post-quantum cryptography standards, by 2031.

Josh:
And it positions the U.S. government to lead wider adoption of these stronger

Josh:
security standards to address future quantum computing threats.

Josh:
That seems conservative. because at the rate that progress is being made for

Josh:
them to transition all of their computer systems to cryptographic

Josh:
resistant quantum by 2031 I don't know we might get there a little bit beforehand

Josh:
but those are the two things it's noteworthy that these are being signed because

Josh:
that means it's at least front of mind for enough people to get these on executive

Josh:
orders to get these passed get these bills signed

Josh:
and I think it signals the fact that this is very real this is happening and

Josh:
there's a tremendous amount of progress being made in the space.

Ejaaz:
Now the last time that the government took such action for a specific technology was AI.

Ejaaz:
And if you remember, it was also followed very soon after by an actual investment

Ejaaz:
from the government into equity stakes in different companies in AI, right?

Ejaaz:
So they made the Intel investment where they acquired, I think,

Ejaaz:
10% of the stock or the company itself.

Ejaaz:
They did something similar about three weeks ago when they announced the CHIPS

Ejaaz:
Act, where they invested $2 billion across nine different quantum-based technology companies.

Ejaaz:
Most of them are private. There are some public.

Ejaaz:
And we'll get into what those companies are. But if I were to zoom out and think,

Ejaaz:
why is the government making this investment now specifically?

Ejaaz:
I think they've been rattled by the whole AI thing. I think they've seen how

Ejaaz:
quickly AI models are progressing. thing.

Ejaaz:
They've shut down Fable because it can basically access any of their security

Ejaaz:
systems. And they're thinking, hmm, we need to get ahead of this other technology,

Ejaaz:
which could potentially pose an even worse threat.

Ejaaz:
And we're going to be more proactive. We're going to invest in the companies

Ejaaz:
that are actually building this foundational layer before they go public.

Ejaaz:
And we're going to be able to effectively control what they build and how they

Ejaaz:
build it and get access to the thing before they release it publicly. Now,

Ejaaz:
I'm in two minds about whether this is a good or bad thing.

Ejaaz:
On the good side, I like that, you know, a government is taking an equity stake

Ejaaz:
in the GDP and companies that are prospering, that are innovating in their own domain.

Ejaaz:
But I'm also like, are you trying to nationalize this technology before it even

Ejaaz:
comes to fruition? And I feel like that has bad effects on the whole capitalist side of things.

Ejaaz:
Either way, I think it's cool. I think it's interesting. I think the timelines

Ejaaz:
are a little conservative only because you have AI models now that you could

Ejaaz:
probably chuck at this problem and it'll accelerate quantum chip development

Ejaaz:
probably pretty rapidly at this point.

Josh:
Yeah, listen, I'm happy for them. They're buying it early, but I'm interested

Josh:
in how I can buy in early. I think that's what I want.

Ejaaz:
To talk about.

Josh:
And to get there, we probably want to start with the big ones,

Josh:
the ones who have solved this problem called fault tolerance.

Josh:
There's this problem with these quantum bits because they don't really exist

Josh:
how you want them. They're very noisy and they're impossible to measure as a

Josh:
result. So therefore you get a lot of noisy results as you test these things.

Josh:
They don't work. there's this thing called fault tolerance where you kind of

Josh:
pair together these noisy qubits and it gives you a local qubit that local qubit actually reads out

Josh:
what we call fault tolerant outputs and that is the measurement that these companies

Josh:
are using to determine how powerful their quantum chips are

Josh:
the two companies leading this right now are the two you would expect these

Josh:
are not anything surprising this is google this is microsoft they have been

Josh:
leading the race for a long time google has this roadmap on their website actually

Josh:
which i thought was phenomenal

Josh:
and it kind of walks through the progress that they plan to see along with dates that they have

Josh:
And as we click through these, I mean milestone 3 is coming along It's an order

Josh:
of magnitude improvement.

Josh:
Then milestone 4 is another order of magnitude 5 and 6 are also.

Josh:
Full order of magnitude improvement. So each step of this process that they're

Josh:
planning to do, maybe every couple of years is going to be a full 10x improvement.

Josh:
And the same is true with Microsoft. So those are the two companies that we

Josh:
know are creating these quantum computers, they're the furthest ahead,

Josh:
they have the most resources allocated, that is kind of the top level of the stack.

Josh:
If you go further down the stack, there's another couple of options here.

Josh:
And those use a slightly different way of going about this quantum race.

Josh:
So you could think of it as like three different ways of doing quantum computers.

Josh:
There's the traditional superconduction, which means you require a lot of cooling.

Josh:
That's when you see those crazy big computers.

Josh:
They cool a tiny little chip and it freezes it to the point where it removes

Josh:
all the noise from the system.

Josh:
Then there's a second thing called trapped ions, which is where there's a second

Josh:
set of company. And then a third, which is called neutral atoms.

Josh:
It gets a little technical there, but let's go into the stack just below Microsoft

Josh:
and Google. You guys, do you have a few options over there?

Ejaaz:
Yeah, Google and Microsoft have been kind of like forging the path at least

Ejaaz:
publicly for everyone to kind of like see.

Ejaaz:
One thing I couldn't help but notice is the updates that these two companies

Ejaaz:
who are basically leaders in this field at this point have primarily been infrastructure updates.

Ejaaz:
So the updates are like, if you look at the news here that I'm showing from

Ejaaz:
Microsoft's recent major runner to quantum chip news is basically,

Ejaaz:
hey, yeah, we increased the architecture by a thousand fold and then when you

Ejaaz:
look into like what it actually does you're like

Ejaaz:
I don't really know. It's just a cool science experiment that we could run in our lab.

Ejaaz:
And like, we brought the error rate down and we're like, great.

Ejaaz:
Like, what are we actually using it for?

Ejaaz:
So we dug into what companies are actually, one, public or two,

Ejaaz:
private, but actually building something cool and uniquely available that retail

Ejaaz:
might be able to play around with eventually.

Ejaaz:
And the number one company that came at the top of that list is that age-old

Ejaaz:
company, that age-old computing company called IBM.

Ejaaz:
And the US government- That's crazy. Yeah, it's a dinosaur. Exactly.

Ejaaz:
And the US government had a $2 billion investment vehicle, which they dispersed

Ejaaz:
three weeks ago that I mentioned earlier.

Ejaaz:
And 50% of that $1 billion went into IBM.

Ejaaz:
So you might be wondering, why on earth was it going into IBM?

Ejaaz:
Well, IBM has actually been cooking up a quantum product for a while now.

Ejaaz:
It's called IBM Quantum, and it serves over 210 organizations.

Ejaaz:
And they've been working on their qubit chip, essentially their quantum computer for a while now.

Ejaaz:
They have it in a very basic form. It's not really widely accessible to the public.

Ejaaz:
But I was wondering, what are they using this for? Well, there's two main applications right now.

Ejaaz:
One is being run by the Cleveland Clinic, and it's being used to simulate a

Ejaaz:
specific type of protein that can treat certain ailments that their patients experience.

Ejaaz:
They're focusing on building a specific protein that is around 300 atoms in

Ejaaz:
size. So we're talking about literally the most microscopic of microscopic types

Ejaaz:
of molecules. But the idea is it'll form a foundation to build antibodies that

Ejaaz:
they can serve up to their clients.

Ejaaz:
Again, it's nowhere near at the clinical trial level, but it's something that

Ejaaz:
they've been playing around with. And apparently it's been very useful for them.

Ejaaz:
The second company is in the complete opposite end of the field,

Ejaaz:
which is HSBC has been running quant algos using their version of a quantum computer.

Ejaaz:
So quant, quantum, there you go, to basically come up with new algorithms for trading.

Ejaaz:
Now, the last time I checked, HSBC hasn't made all the money in the world.

Ejaaz:
They haven't beat Jane Street. They haven't beat Citadel. So I think we're okay for now.

Ejaaz:
It's interesting to see the kind of applications and interest that,

Ejaaz:
or rather the variety that a lot of these companies are experiencing for IBM's

Ejaaz:
products specifically.

Ejaaz:
You've got Mercedes-Benz that's using this, Exxon Mobil, Bosch is using it.

Ejaaz:
So anywhere and anyone across the hardware layer, the hardware stack,

Ejaaz:
whether it's cars, whether it's drills, whether it's motors,

Ejaaz:
whatever that might be, is playing around with this quantum stuff to try and

Ejaaz:
figure out how they could advance their own science and materials technology.

Ejaaz:
And then the other companies that kind of like top of this list that isn't publicly

Ejaaz:
invested in by the government but we're spoken about is google they've been

Ejaaz:
spending a lot of time working on this

Ejaaz:
uh they have their chips i think sundar pichai last year announced a major breakthrough

Ejaaz:
and then you have a few other companies which we'll get into now

Josh:
Okay so we can help with biology but i'm still interested in where it's going

Josh:
to start to break things and destroy things because it feels like that will

Josh:
be then too large to um ignore

Josh:
and it seems like i have a few numbers that i found during research today that

Josh:
we need about 4,000 to 6,000 of these bits,

Josh:
in order to start actually breaking the standard encryption.

Josh:
And we need even less to break elliptical curve encryption. Now,

Josh:
you don't need to know what elliptical curve encryption is.

Josh:
All you need to know is that is the encryption that underlines Bitcoin and modern

Josh:
messaging and a lot of that type of encryption.

Josh:
That needs 1,200. The current numbers today, where we're at,

Josh:
Google Willa, which was announced, I believe, at the end of 2024,

Josh:
early 2025, has 105 of these.

Josh:
IBM has 120 of these, scaling very quickly to 360.

Josh:
And when they talk about the way that these systems improve,

Josh:
they are orders of magnitude.

Josh:
They will continue to 10x, which means we are maybe one to two full orders of

Josh:
magnitude away from really having like a pretty significant impact on standard encryption.

Josh:
So we have our biological impact. We have the encryption impact.

Josh:
We also have, I'm sure, a lot of mathematical use cases that we don't understand.

Josh:
Within these companies, there are more that we haven't talked about.

Josh:
The first one is Rigetti, which I actually haven't heard of, EGES.

Josh:
What is Rigetti and why is it an interesting quantum company?

Ejaaz:
Well, Rigetti has been around since 2021 and there's actually a really good

Ejaaz:
analogy to explain what they do.

Ejaaz:
So in the AI world, when you create all these chips and you want to serve up

Ejaaz:
this wonderful compute to AI labs, there's this intermediary player that basically

Ejaaz:
helps you do this, they're known as a neocloud, or in the traditional sense,

Ejaaz:
it's Amazon Web Services.

Ejaaz:
They run the- No, we have neoclods for quantum. Yep, yep, yep.

Ejaaz:
We have neoclods for quantum. That's essentially what Rigetti does.

Ejaaz:
And they own the entire stack, which is really interesting and separate from

Ejaaz:
like the typical cloud services.

Ejaaz:
They design the chip and they fab the chip.

Ejaaz:
So as you can see, like a vertically integrated stack like that,

Ejaaz:
it's kind of similar to what Google does with TPUs on the AI chips,

Ejaaz:
and they serve up the actual AI model themselves.

Ejaaz:
That's the equivalent of what Rigetti is doing. But at the very small market cap of $7.1 billion.

Ejaaz:
Now, we were looking at like the stock performance over the last or over its

Ejaaz:
existence, and it's up 122%.

Ejaaz:
It hasn't been performing too crazy on the news. I think like it probably reacted

Ejaaz:
pretty well from the government investment about three weeks ago.

Ejaaz:
But the idea is these companies are entirely small. They haven't proven their

Ejaaz:
ability to scale yet because there is nothing to scale. The major players,

Ejaaz:
Google and Microsoft, hasn't actually built something yet that is worth noticing.

Ejaaz:
Now, the second company that I want to speak about that the government also

Ejaaz:
put in another $100 million check-in is this company called D-Wave.

Ejaaz:
Now, if we scroll to like the old time, it's up a similar amount.

Ejaaz:
It's around 141%, and it was formed around the same time that Rigetti was as well.

Ejaaz:
Now, the whole form of D-Wave is, okay, so let's say you create this quantum

Ejaaz:
chip, and let's say you're an enterprise that wants to use this thing.

Ejaaz:
You need to heavily optimize everything from the chip to the actual application

Ejaaz:
within your enterprise to make it make sense.

Ejaaz:
The irony is we're seeing the same thing here. You have all these fancy AI models,

Ejaaz:
but all these enterprises are like, I don't know how to connect this to my team

Ejaaz:
or to my database or to do the thing that i wanted to do that's essentially

Ejaaz:
what d-wave quantum does

Josh:
Yeah i think i want to note something that i see in both of these charts as you're pulling them up

Josh:
they were very dormant until when when does the volume actually start like when

Josh:
does it pick up around the end of 2024 yeah and

Josh:
that synchronizes with the announcement of google willow which signaled to the

Josh:
world i believe that quantum computing is serious they have achieved a,

Josh:
Like a meaningful amount, a triple digit amount of these fault tolerant qubits.

Josh:
And there's a clear trajectory to scaling that.

Josh:
And I think that moment in 2024, when you see both of these charts start to

Josh:
move, although it hasn't been unbelievable gains, it's been a much different

Josh:
than the dormant four years prior that these companies have been trading.

Josh:
It feels very much like the early days of AI. And I was just listening to this

Josh:
conversation with Fei-Fei Li.

Josh:
She's one of like the godmothers of AI. She was one of these three critical

Josh:
components that led to current day AI that we have using this thing called ImageNet.

Josh:
And it reminds me very similarly of the story that she was telling where it

Josh:
was very much a research project for a very long time and a lot of people didn't

Josh:
take it too seriously they saw the signs but they never thought it would work

Josh:
they thought it would be years decades away

Josh:
and the reality is is that all it took was a single breakthrough,

Josh:
with product market fit as it relates to something like chat gpt to really start

Josh:
this race so it feels to me now like we are in the research and development phase

Josh:
of quantum where a lot of these companies are spending lots of money the government

Josh:
is participating they're investing a lot they're showing some signs of life

Josh:
these companies are not completely dormant we have some volume here it is being traded

Josh:
and there will be a moment in

Josh:
time in which that switch flips how long is that going to be i don't know

Josh:
but now feels like that early time where okay they have a hundred this year

Josh:
maybe they get a thousand two years from now maybe they get ten thousand two

Josh:
years from then at what point.

Josh:
On that scale? Does it actually start to meaningfully impact the world?

Josh:
And I think it's similar to AI where there will be a moment in which it very much does.

Josh:
Like if they are able to start decrypting the internet, that's like a huge deal.

Josh:
And there very much should be a race to solve this. And I will assume this will

Josh:
be like a very large government thing because the downstream implications of

Josh:
what these quantum computers can do is huge.

Josh:
So when I see these charts, when I look at these companies, I'm imagining a

Josh:
five to 10 year investment that I'm going to put in to seed this thing

Josh:
to be early in the research development and hope that one of these will actually wind up being

Josh:
the core weave neo cloud it will be the i mean will the next google be google

Josh:
probably possibly it seems like they're the furthest ahead

Josh:
but that's kind of how i'm looking at this right now it's like these are research

Josh:
projects that are showing some signs of life and some will win and the ones

Josh:
that do it looks like they're going to win pretty big.

Ejaaz:
Yeah i mean the coolest part is you aren't just looking at small random companies

Ejaaz:
that you've never heard of that are working on this on these technologies they're

Ejaaz:
important companies google and Microsoft are name brands.

Ejaaz:
And the good part is they've been investing in this for well over a decade.

Ejaaz:
And Google, you know, somehow manages to be the first for all of these different

Ejaaz:
technologies. They were essentially the first that invested so much in AI.

Ejaaz:
And they're the same doing it on the quantum side of things as well.

Ejaaz:
So just as like a general basket bet, usually their companies do very well as

Ejaaz:
in terms of exposure to these newer technologies.

Ejaaz:
In terms of the convergence of AI and quantum right now, and the government

Ejaaz:
making significant investments in both of these technologies.

Ejaaz:
I don't think it's a coincidence by any chance. If I think about these two technologies,

Ejaaz:
I kind of think about them as very rudimentary tools, which you can kind of

Ejaaz:
like wave at any problem.

Ejaaz:
And theoretically, they could fix it. And we're nowhere near that right now.

Ejaaz:
Air models hallucinate. They get a lot of things wrong.

Ejaaz:
And then on the quantum side of things, we don't even have anything to use right now.

Ejaaz:
But the idea is directionally, over that five to 10 year time span that you

Ejaaz:
mentioned, Josh, I believe we'll see these two technologies be the most important

Ejaaz:
and impactful on humanity as a whole.

Ejaaz:
And what that yields, what breakthroughs and innovations, material sciences,

Ejaaz:
molecular compounds that that creates, we don't know yet and we don't need to

Ejaaz:
necessarily know yet, but it's definitely two tracks that we need to pay very close attention to.

Ejaaz:
And I have a feeling, a strong feeling that both of these technologies will

Ejaaz:
be very heavily intertwined. If you are an AI model provider and you want a

Ejaaz:
smart computer to kind of like regulate and guide the AI model.

Ejaaz:
Quantum computer sounds like it kind of like knows what it's doing.

Ejaaz:
It understands the molecular simulations of a bunch of how the world works,

Ejaaz:
the physical reality. It's interesting you mentioned Fei-Fei Li,

Ejaaz:
like she's building an amazing world model, which I believe is gonna be the

Ejaaz:
next iteration of AI models.

Ejaaz:
What's one great unlock about a world model? It understands physical reality,

Ejaaz:
gives the LLM an understanding of how the world actually works,

Ejaaz:
sees and feels through the human kind of set of sensors.

Ejaaz:
And I believe quantum computers could potentially be that to AI models.

Ejaaz:
Now, a lot of that is hearsay right now.

Ejaaz:
I have no proof for all of this. I'm not a quantum expert, but it feels generally

Ejaaz:
that's where the world is taking a step towards.

Josh:
Yeah. And in terms of tangible timelines, we have today, we have dozens to 100

Josh:
qubits. By 2027 to 2029, the expectation is to get hundreds of these.

Josh:
And then by the early 30s, the expectation is for thousands of these.

Josh:
And those definitions and the timelines, as we know, they get very fuzzy.

Josh:
Like you mentioned, AI is very closely intertwined. A lot of these things kind

Josh:
of converge on themselves.

Josh:
They speed up expectations. And we know this. We've seen this before where we,

Josh:
we, everyone was like, no, AGI isn't going to come for decades.

Josh:
And like, here we are right on the doorstep.

Josh:
The estimates have been a little weird. Back in 2019, it was estimated that

Josh:
it would take about 20 million qubits to break the popular encryption RSA 2048

Josh:
that the internet runs on, and it would take a couple hours.

Josh:
By last year, a Google researcher showed that it could be done with under 1

Josh:
million qubits in under a week.

Josh:
And then new error correction schemes are probably going to push that number even lower.

Josh:
So we're getting this accelerated rate of progress that I think we saw in AI,

Josh:
and that's going to push things in a really interesting place and maybe cause

Josh:
a little bit of panic because the downstream implications of this are huge.

Josh:
But I think that is, that's the update.

Josh:
That is the all encompassing kind of state of the union on quantum as it relates

Josh:
to just the companies involved and how to invest in them.

Josh:
Thankfully, a lot of them are public. Thankfully, a lot of them are not even trading that high.

Josh:
I'm not sure if they will for quite some time, but those are the players to

Josh:
look out for. Those are the companies that the government is investing in.

Josh:
Those are the companies that are showing signs of life on the chart for the first time in history.

Josh:
And those of the companies that are seeding the roots to this new exponential

Josh:
growth curve that we have in the world of quantum. It's much earlier than something

Josh:
like AI, but I imagine we'll see a very similar trajectory.

Josh:
And that's something excited to be in. So personally, I mean,

Josh:
I'm not in any quantum exposure right now. Maybe I should. I mean,

Josh:
I guess Google accounts technically.

Josh:
But what do you think, Ejaz? Is this something you're interested in?

Ejaaz:
So one, yes, something I'm interested in, but only to the sense where it's like

Ejaaz:
a decade hold at this point.

Ejaaz:
The other thing I really wanted to say is it's kind of nice that a lot of these

Ejaaz:
companies that were invested in are essentially public. Like there's a bunch

Ejaaz:
of private companies, but

Ejaaz:
IBM has been around for a while and also these other small cap companies like

Ejaaz:
Rigetti and D-Wave, which, by the way, I'm not recommending investing at all.

Ejaaz:
I own nothing in it. Disclaimer, this is not investment advice.

Ejaaz:
It's just interesting to see that they are publicly available for the retail

Ejaaz:
to get access to if they believe in this thesis and if they believe those companies

Ejaaz:
are going to be able to fulfill the vision that we kind of like laid out on this episode.

Ejaaz:
With all of that being said, I'll have a small back in quantum.

Ejaaz:
I do believe I've been bullish on it for a while now. But to be honest,

Ejaaz:
like one, a lot of the technology itself kind of escapes me,

Ejaaz:
I need to do a lot more learning.

Ejaaz:
And two, I think AI is still going to be the focus for a while now.

Ejaaz:
But that's where the asymmetry when it comes to investing kind of lies at the

Ejaaz:
moment. But I believe that is it for this episode. That's the quantum episode.

Ejaaz:
If I had one single prompt for the audience, it would be if you're one of the

Ejaaz:
210 organizations that are working with IBM on their quantum product,

Ejaaz:
what are you doing with it?

Ejaaz:
Like, or if you know something about this that we haven't mentioned on the show,

Ejaaz:
I would love to hear more about what you guys are kind of like thinking about

Ejaaz:
how these quantum computers will be applied because right now it's not too clear

Ejaaz:
and maybe that's just the simple answer at this point.

Josh:
As always, thank you guys so much for watching. If you enjoyed this episode,

Josh:
please don't forget to share it with a friend who you think might also enjoy.

Josh:
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Josh:
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Josh:
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Josh:
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Josh:
It is time that we're going to need to include just a little bit.

Josh:
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Josh:
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Josh:
You can message in the comments below, whatever it may be, just reach out and

Josh:
let us know. We appreciate it. But as always, thank you so much for watching

Josh:
and we will see you guys in the next episode.