The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology

Quantum computing is drawing billions in investment, but the open source software layer that could make it all work is falling through the cracks. Who fills that gap — and why should philanthropy care?

Show Notes

Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat
In this special live-streamed discussion, Will Zeng, co-founder of the Unitary Foundation, and Ziyaad Bhorat, VP at the Mozilla Foundation, join host Sebastian Hassinger to unpack their co-authored white paper, The Open Foundation Quantum Technology Needs. The paper argues that open source quantum software is structurally underfunded — too applied for academic grants, too public-good for venture capital — and that philanthropic organizations need to step in before the window closes.
This conversation arrives at a pivotal moment. Google recently published a paper showing Shor's algorithm could break ECDLP-256 with roughly 500,000 physical qubits — a 20x improvement over prior estimates — while Oratomic launched claiming 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits may be sufficient for cryptographically relevant computation. The timelines are compressing. The question is whether the software ecosystem can keep pace with the hardware.
The video of our conversation can be viewed on YouTube.

What you'll learn
  • Why open source quantum software falls into a structural funding gap between academic grants and venture capital — and what that means for the field's trajectory
  • How Mozilla Foundation evaluates emerging technology fields for philanthropic intervention, and what specifically convinced them quantum was ripe for engagement
  • What Google's 20x efficiency gain for Shor's algorithm and the Oratomic launch mean for Q-Day timelines and post-quantum migration urgency
  • Why the "quantum Linux" analogy is useful but incomplete — and what the real risk is (fragmentation, not monopoly)
  • How Unitary Foundation's microgrant program ($4,000, six months) has become a faster on-ramp to quantum careers than traditional academic pathways
  • What PyMatching, PyZX, and other microgrant-funded projects reveal about the scalability of small open source investments
  • Why open source benchmarking through Metriq Gym matters — and why vendor-driven benchmarks can't fill this role
  • How the Qiskit team reductions at IBM illustrate the fragility of corporate-backed open source in quantum
  • What specific policy asks the quantum open source community has for the NQI reauthorization
  • The von Neumann vs. ENIAC lesson: why openness wins over secrecy in building transformative computing platforms

Resources & links
  • The Open Foundation Quantum Technology Needs — The white paper by Zeng, Castanon, and Bhorat (March 2026) that anchors this conversation
  • Unitary Foundation — 501(c)(3) non-profit building, governing, and sustaining open source quantum software since 2018 
  • Mozilla Foundation — Non-profit championing open source and internet health, supporting Unitary Foundation's quantum work
  • Mitiq — Open source toolkit for quantum error mitigation
  • Metriq — Community-driven quantum benchmarking platform 
  • Metriq Gym — Open source benchmarking suite for quantum computers 
  • Unitary Compiler Collection (UCC) — Quantum circuit compilation tools
  • QuTiP — Quantum Toolbox in Python, stewarded by Unitary Foundation
  • PyMatching — Open source decoder for quantum error correction, originally funded by a UF microgrant 
  • PyZX — ZX-calculus library for quantum circuit optimization, also originating from UF support 
  • Unitary Hack — Annual bug bounty hackathon connecting open source quantum projects with global contributors 
  • CSIS Commission on U.S. Quantum Leadership — Warning on quantum decryption surprise referenced in the white paper
  • Will Zeng — President and co-founder of Unitary Foundation; Partner at Quantonation; DPhil in Quantum Information, University of Oxford
  • Ziyaad Bhorat — VP of Imagination and Strategic Growth, Mozilla Foundation; PhD in Political Science, UCLA

Key quotes
"Do we want a future where quantum computers are developed by secret government contractors with specialized PhDs who have top secret security clearances? Or do we want a future where quantum computers are built in the private sector, competing to provide economic value to everyone around the world?" — Will Zeng

"Do not be afraid to experiment. We're doing ourselves a disservice to be slow, especially in a space that really warrants experimentation." — Ziyaad Bhorat, on his message to philanthropic colleagues

"There's billions of people on the planet who want to do exciting and interesting things. Building quantum technology is one of those. If you have enough motivation, you just need to provide some on-ramps." — Will Zeng

"We should put forward an affirmative vision of what that future should look like and drive towards it — because otherwise it will be built in secret." — Ziyaad Bhorat

"The US spends 30, 35 billion on potato chips every year. There's a lot of room to grow." — Will Zeng, on the scale of quantum investment relative to what's needed


Related episodes

Subscribe & connect
If this conversation sparked ideas about how your organization can support open source quantum infrastructure, the white paper linked above lays out the full case — and Unitary Foundation's microgrant program is always accepting applications from quantum developers worldwide.

Creators and Guests

Guest
Will Zeng
Co-founder and president of Unitary Foundaiton, partner at Quantonation, quantum researcher
Guest
Ziyaad Bhorat
VP Mozilla Foundation, political scientist, investor at Melo Avenue Capital

What is The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology?

Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, interviews brilliant research scientists, software developers, engineers and others actively exploring the possibilities of our new quantum era. We will cover topics in quantum computing, networking and sensing, focusing on hardware, algorithms and general theory. The show aims for accessibility - Sebastian is not a physicist - and we'll try to provide context for the terminology and glimpses at the fascinating history of this new field as it evolves in real time.

Sebastian Hassinger (00:01.871)
All right, we are live with the first live streaming episode of the new Quantum Era. I'm Sebastian Hassinger, your I'm joined today by two really special guests. I'm very excited about this conversation. Ziad Borat, you're a VP from the Mozilla Foundation. And Will Zhang, should say. We're old friends. I forgot to add your last name. Co-founder of the Unitary Foundation.

and venture capitalist and research scientist within the field of quantum computing. So welcome to both of you. I wanted to get you together because of a white paper you've both co-authored recently about the need for funding open source in quantum computing. So Ziad, can you tell me first what sort of prompted the creation of that white paper?

Ziyaad Bhorat (00:59.426)
Absolutely. And great to be here. Thanks so much, Sebastian. And great to chat as well. And also on this auspicious day of World Quantum Day. We at the Mozilla Foundation are always looking for what is on the horizon, how to learn by doing. And we saw an opportunity to be involved in open source quantum computing at an earlier phase.

then I would say some in the philanthropic space had been involved in AI. And so that was a good comparator for us. Reaching out to speaking to Will and the team and other grantees in our portfolio around open source AI, we quickly realized we need to be doing something similar for the field of open source quantum. And so that was really motivating our foray into the field is also very much learning. Learning by doing and an earlier.

point of intervention. So I want to emphasize that as a kind of rationale and that comes through in our paper.

Sebastian Hassinger (02:01.435)
Yeah. Yeah. And we'll, mean, I imagine Mozilla Foundation is, is, you know, sort of the a hundred pound gorilla in open source. The, motivation for partnering with Mozilla is pretty clear, but the, the, the core sort of thesis of the paper is that there's a funding gap for, for open source within quantum. what, what is the nature of that funding gap from your perspective?

Will Zeng (02:27.074)
Yeah, look, and again, Sebastian, thanks for having me on here. maybe I'll just add kind of working with Mozilla is another example. Like I've been in quantum technologies for a long time. Like it's the that I grew up in and we can learn so much from the first round of classical computing, first rounds of classical computing. A lot of what we get to do in quantum is learn from what happened in classical computing and try and add interventions early when things can be really, really high leverage.

Sebastian Hassinger (02:42.843)
Yeah.

Will Zeng (02:56.558)
And that's why the Intertree Foundation is now kind of almost coming up on its eighth year and trying to build that open source culture in when the field is small enough that we kind of all, we sort of all still know each other. The goal is to grow it to where we don't. And so if we can build that stuff in earlier, then we'll get all the benefits that come from it as the entire industry matures. Now, I would say that the

Sebastian Hassinger (03:10.983)
Yeah.

Will Zeng (03:26.336)
If it is behind the white paper is not just about a funding gap. It's about, it's about a funding gap plus other things, because public goods and open source aren't just about money.

So there's, when they have a new industry emerge, there's some things that can get built by existing structures. know, there's the academics are really great at making papers with new ideas, like, you know, or corporate research labs, there's research infrastructure for writing papers. And then there's stuff that venture capitalists can fund. I'm one of them. There's things that are, you know, even long-term deep tech technology shapes, but there's other things in industries that exist that aren't that that's these public goods networks.

standards, benchmarks, open source software, compilers, training materials, just like person to person education networks. All this kind of stuff we know is really crucial glue for making an industry work. And when you've got a new industry, like we do have in quantum technologies with a bunch of different products and companies all related to each other, you have to ask where is that public goods glue going to come from? And that's what we've been trying to foster.

at Unitary Foundation with a lot of folks in the ecosystem. And it's what we, how to do that is what we want to learn from folks like the Mozilla Foundation or anyone really who's been through this kind of transition in building an industry.

Sebastian Hassinger (04:48.153)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And Ziad, you mentioned this from the Mozilla perspective as being a learning opportunity. what, I obviously the field of quantum is a learning opportunity for everyone. I'm certainly one of those who's been on this very steep learning curve in quantum technologies for a number of years now. But I'm curious what you saw institutionally as sort of the...

the comparison points, what were the things that looked familiar to Mozilla for this stage of quantum? Because obviously the unfamiliar parts are pretty obvious. So what were the comparison points to other early stage technology markets that you have been active in all the way back to the browser?

Ziyaad Bhorat (05:35.608)
Yeah, it's a great question. think some of the things, and I'll share a couple of anecdotes that were precursors to us really circling and finding great partners like Unitary Foundation for this work, is that we started to see communities develop across the world around quantum that weren't even necessarily technical. They were artistic communities, right? They were philosophers. They were theologians starting to think through what is quantum mechanics? What is expression of quantum in, you know,

talking about definition of being and autistic expression. And that's usually a signal that something big is happening in society, right? And we need to be involved in it. And so the community centric approach really that started to form around quantum was an early signal for us needing to take a look into correctly put Sebastian unfamiliar territory. Many folk at the foundation and myself included do not have a technical knowledge of quantum.

technology. And so we need to develop that capacity capability, plug into those communities, grow them and strengthen them as well. I think the other anecdote that I want to share was again to the comparator of AI. There's a lot of high level interest from governments as non state actors in quantum computing right now. And when we had discussions around AI quantum computing

computing was often folded in into the category of emerging and frontier technology. And as an advocate for open weights and open source AI in particular, thought we had to have to confront the question of how do we think about the open source quantum question? And so it came up in that, you know, both grassroots and grass tops intervention spaces. And then the final thing I will say is that, you know, to Will's point about risk and venture capitalism.

Sebastian Hassinger (07:02.567)
Okay.

Ziyaad Bhorat (07:29.112)
It also has to do with how you think of the role of philanthropy in general. We see at the foundation in particular, we see our role as deploying philanthropic capital at a high risk stage of intervention. Really when you can be experimental, you're not looking for capital returns. You're looking to demonstrate that something works in the field and can be a model for it. So it's an earlier stage.

Sebastian Hassinger (07:42.918)
Yeah.

Ziyaad Bhorat (07:54.672)
And so for us, it just felt like the right moment to be engaging.

Sebastian Hassinger (08:01.169)
That's really interesting. And I guess that goes back to what you were saying, Will, about it's not just about capital or access to funding for open source projects, but this broader sort of culture or societal engagement with the topic across the board. I guess, I mean, you you list in the paper a number of supporters of the Unitary Foundation already, the NSF, DOE, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, beyond

that core group, what's sort of the next tranche of supporters and engagement that you'd like to see more broadly to start to grapple with those sort of broader issues?

Will Zeng (08:43.19)
Yeah, honestly, the next one we want to go for is everyone who builds classical open stores. Because they have a lot of skills that are super relevant. I think, look, like people don't necessarily have a sense of how early quantum technology is like, see world leaders pop up there and say quantum and AI and or something you put quantum first sometimes. And we're all super excited that last year, there was more than 10 billion in private investment in quantum technology. Now before 2020, that private funding

Sebastian Hassinger (08:47.014)
Hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (09:02.331)
Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger (09:08.199)
Yeah.

Will Zeng (09:12.558)
5 BC was like less than a hundred million. It's sort of de minimis. So we're really excited that we've gotten to 10 billion, but the US spends 30, 35 billion on potato chips every year. Like there's a lot of room to grow. And sometimes people don't realize how much leverage they have in taking skills that already exist and bringing them in.

Sebastian Hassinger (09:25.661)
That's humbling.

Will Zeng (09:41.198)
And maybe I'll give an example because that's kind of like how the Unitary Foundation got started at all. So about eight years ago, I was running the software and applications team at company called Reggetti Computing, which is one of the first quantum computing companies. That's now a pretty big public company. And we were releasing our first software and we decided to do open source software for a couple of reasons. One of them that really applied then and applies a little bit less is just credibility.

Like nobody knew what a quantum computer was. so you were filling this magic black box that no one knew had a program and they couldn't see the software and they didn't understand it. Like it wasn't really going to fly. So we needed to white box it. so, you know, it's different, but it's in Python. I guess would be the same. Yeah. I mean, you have to think about things differently, but you can learn it's a little learning algebra, just add some complex numbers, all that stuff. And, and when we did that, some surprising stuff happened. So.

Sebastian Hassinger (10:11.485)
Peace.

Sebastian Hassinger (10:24.669)
Right, yeah, not that different, yeah.

Will Zeng (10:38.53)
We got contributors from the usual suspects, whatever, Harvard, MIT, Caltech, people that we kind of knew. But then people started closing bugs on GitHub who were hobby software engineers in Eastern Europe, an Irish high school student, an Indian master's student who was really into quantum and had nobody to talk to. And yeah, they weren't coming up with some breakthrough computational complexity result with a new algorithm.

But they were fixing real bugs in real software. was Python, the docs were bad. Like this is really useful work. And that opened up my eyes to just how accessible a seemingly inaccessible technology can be if you give people entry points. There's billions of people on planet who want to do exciting and interesting things and building quantum technology is one of those. And if you have enough motivation, then you just need to provide some on ramps for people to cross over.

Sebastian Hassinger (11:32.209)
Yeah. Yeah.

Will Zeng (11:33.774)
And so when I talk about it not just being about funding, like the funding is actually downstream of the people. We really want the people and kind of the who are doing this and building it. And there's a lot of ways to get there. There's in kind contributions, you know, but of course money helps too.

Sebastian Hassinger (11:52.381)
Yeah. I suppose, mean, what you just touched on, unitary hack demonstrates that every year, right? You bring in people who don't necessarily have specialized knowledge in quantum at all. just, they're into open source software development and they can close bugs and they can, yeah, exactly. it's

Will Zeng (12:11.086)
You guys know a little bit about that as an example too. you know, there's a lot of people use hackathons as a way to get people exposed to stuff. And we do hackathons in a little bit of a different way at Unitray Foundation. It's called Unitray Hack. think we're on like year five now. I mean, it's really taken off. And it's a, weeks, we put up bug bounties. So we go to maintainers of some of the important open source software that we know. think last year we had maybe 30, 30 to 40.

different projects, we go to the maintainers and they have a few needs, right? They need issues, features built, bugs, you know, resolved. And then they also want to connect with people who would contribute longer term, not just like one transactional thing. And so what we do is we allocate to them some bounty budget in that two week period. And then they can put that budget on whatever issues on GitHub they want people to solve. And then people sign up around the world, you four or five.

hundred we've had, more hundreds who've joined and they come together and then close issues and get paid from wherever. And look, it's kind of surprising where you find people and money goes a lot further in other parts of the world. And it's also an accountability mechanism. Like even if it's not necessarily like going to be your full-time job to close bounties on Unitary Hack yet, it shows that your contributions are being valued by the people who you want recognition from, which are the maintainers and us.

And so that's something we do once a year. I'd love to multiple times a year. Frankly, we want to get to a world where people can exist as full-time quantum open source developers in the same way that they exist as, you know, developers on Linux or Apache or like they're, they're kind of freelance full-time open source developers who can get paid doing that. And we really need that in quantum because even though the hardware is getting better, the software is just still a huge gap.

that needs like, and we can talk more about this, but like, there's a lot of software that doesn't exist that needs to get built.

Sebastian Hassinger (14:12.125)
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, listening to what we'll saying that, I mean, to me, that sounds like, it addresses directly the need for a quantum workforce, which is workforce development is, sort of central to all of the national quantum strategies that I'm aware of, even regional ones. from your perspective, is that a big part of the, the pitch, I guess, for philanthropic backing is that this is a, a new set of job.

know, opportunities of career opportunities, career paths, especially at a time when the, the, the, the path for pathway for software development, is in flux, let's say because of AI and its impact. Is that part of the appeal for quantum at this point for Mozilla and its supporters?

Ziyaad Bhorat (15:01.36)
There's definitely a question around the future of work and where we see.

Ziyaad Bhorat (15:13.452)
in particular across the spectrum. But what I would just like emphasize is Will's point about creating on-ramps. I think it's less about career workforce planning and more about community development because communities will create the opportunities for a workforce if you give them those on-ramps. And I think it's really about starting at that intervention space first rather than

trying to shape a future career force, to be honest, in our form of intervention. Because that's how we've worked, as Will described the hackathons. Bug bounties for Firefox bugs in particular is a clear example of how this has worked in practice. And what that tends to do is build strong community around a field and area, open source in particular. And as a result, the radiating effect is workforce development. So I would actually put the...

the community element first and then workforce second. Because there's a lot happening in the workforce space right now, as we can tell. I do think, however, to your point that, you know, when we look at national and international mandates in the quantum space, there is an acceleration to thinking through, OK, what critical skills do we need to develop and how do we do so and how do we create the educational off-ranks to do that?

Sebastian Hassinger (16:30.183)
Hmm.

Ziyaad Bhorat (16:38.832)
But, and that isn't necessary, but it's not a sufficient component. If that work is happening in silos, if we're not creating those integrative effects across different communities, even across the world, then net, we're gonna just get there slower. We're just gonna get there in a fragmented manner. And I think that a part of this is actually seeing the community for what it is and bringing it together within the space. And that's what I'm super excited about, then doing this work with Unitree.

Sebastian Hassinger (17:08.583)
That's great. I mean, so it sounds like in a sense, both of you, you know, you're emphasizing community building as a way to accelerate or create a more accretive framework for progress. And the urgency you just mentioned, Ziad, I mean, in the paper, you call out the sort of recent advancements around the efficiency of implementation of Shores, Shores being the factoring algorithm that can potentially crack all codes.

the sort of magical, it's almost like a MacGuffin. It's a plot device in quantum computing, think. but.

Will Zeng (17:43.854)
Yeah, but it's not it's not a plot device. It's kind of an inevitability. Like we're at a timeline, but like something really weird would need to happen where this didn't occur at some

Sebastian Hassinger (17:47.952)
Yeah, for sure.

Sebastian Hassinger (17:54.813)
Yeah. And at some point that future point seems to be getting reeled in closer and closer to the present day. Right. mean, you've got Google's 20x efficiency gain. You've got iceberg quantum with Pinnacle saying they can get the number of physical cubits down to 100,000 for RSA 2048 and or atomic just coming out with something like 50,000 or 10,000. It was even smaller.

Will Zeng (18:24.686)
depends on how much time I spend.

Sebastian Hassinger (18:24.913)
It's incredible. Yeah, exactly. There's the fine print is always, you know, nuanced, but at least at the headline level, that sounds like enormous acceleration. Is that sort of meant as a as almost like the the prod to to get, you know, the national level, the philanthropic community, the sort of the motivation, the top level to really treat this seriously.

and, really put some weight behind the development of that community that's required to fill some of those gaps. And that's for either of you.

Will Zeng (19:01.516)
Yeah, to be a little reductive, it's kind of like, what kind of future do we want for more computing? Do we want a future where quantum computers are developed by secret government contractors with own like specialized PhDs who have top secret security clearances and they, you know, mostly keep them under lock and key? Like, is that the future we want? Or do want a future where quantum computers are built and developed?

Ziyaad Bhorat (19:03.472)
That's very well.

Will Zeng (19:28.394)
in the private sector competing to provide economic value to everyone around the world on a bunch of applications. And we get through this upgrade. So then the they have against encryption kind of goes away. And look, that second future, like it's almost hard to talk about the potential there because again, it's not just like one product. Like if you'd thought about the potential of computers back in the 1950s, you would have missed a whole bunch of benefits that they brought to the world.

And we talk about this white paper, right? The UK government sort of took the approach of let's disassemble the computers that were built at Bletchley Park. They're classified, keep them under lock and key. Because they're for cryptography. And if you took the more expansive view of how do we get these in the hands of people who might think of how to use them in ways that we can't think of now. And that involves openness and on-ramps and accessibility. And you get huge futures where there's a lot of benefit. And that's the world that we want. And so we want to put our...

thumb on the scale to make that happen.

Ziyaad Bhorat (20:28.494)
Yeah, I would agree with that 100%. I mean, every day I open up the news and I'm like, okay, this is the new thing we should be afraid about. know, is it with us today? What is it going to be tomorrow? There's something that we need to be protected from in terms of the bogeyman of like breaking all security. And so to Will's point, we shouldn't be reactive in this space. We should actually put forward an affirmative vision of what that future should look like and drive towards it because otherwise it will be built in secret. And I think that that's not

the way to do things. I mean, it's very clearly not Mozilla's way of doing things and we have a long track record of saying so, but it's also just not the way of doing things because then the future is dictated in private in rooms that no one is privy to. So an open and expansive field in this space is something that I think is necessary and an affirmative vision that is positive that is not based out of fear because so much of this fear is driving kind of policy imperatives.

Sebastian Hassinger (21:09.181)
Right. Right.

Ziyaad Bhorat (21:25.838)
That just needs to change.

Sebastian Hassinger (21:27.495)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Will Zeng (21:28.414)
And I want to pick up what you mentioned because in the last couple of months and it's look, it's going to keep happening. People are coming up with improved estimates that make it easier to use worse quantum computers to break encryption. like there's a lot of asterisks and things that people have put out, but it's going to keep improving. And the hardware itself is going to get better. And it's so important that people are open about those results because there are

Sebastian Hassinger (21:47.43)
Yeah.

Will Zeng (21:56.302)
more closed groups that have been studying this for a long time and know that in more detail. Being open about these resource estimates, and this is where software can play a big role and it's where we're sort of looking for more of the microgrants we do. It's to do open source resource estimates, to do open source development of the error correction overheads and architectures of the things that matter that move those resource estimate numbers around by a lot. So that the world can just be aware of what the actual risk is.

Sebastian Hassinger (22:00.306)
Mm-hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (22:21.873)
Mm-hmm.

Will Zeng (22:22.574)
And these last few open publications have moved timelines for post quantum upgrades publicly for Google to 2029 and CloudFlare's now followed to 2029. I the US government for secure systems is headed to 2030 for a few years. We'll see if they bring it in even further. And so the more aware people are openly of the risk, the sooner they can just do these upgrades and we can just be done with it. And then we can focus on all of the great things that quantum computers can do for us in terms of developing new materials and new chemicals and

I mean, there's all these things I don't even know, but that's where we want to get to.

Sebastian Hassinger (22:57.681)
Yeah. Yeah. No, the openness argument is, a really powerful one. And what's striking to me is there's sort of two distinct, you know, faces to it in this particular context. One is, as you say, sort of the, upgrade, the, the threat to security, the, the, the, the need to, figure out how to secure communications and data against this new attack that was, you know, theoretically.

impossible until short came along and practically impossible until. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. True. True. No, I call it a plot device because, when I, I, I talked to Peter, on the, think the, whatever the 30th anniversary of the algorithm, he was telling me that there's so many weird things about the discovery of that algorithm. One is that it was just after April fools.

Will Zeng (23:32.206)
always knew it was a risk, there's still a risk that regular computers can do it, but anyway, whatever.

Will Zeng (23:49.36)
in.

Sebastian Hassinger (23:57.757)
Um, and on the use net on April fools, there'd been a post about, uh, a, uh, uh, you know, uh, a pretend Soviet technology that could crack all codes. Um, and then he first presented it, uh, on stage, not the first version, but the factoring version, um, at a seminar that Edelman hosted and Edelman was the scientific advisor on sneakers, Hollywood film three years earlier that had had.

A technology that could crack all codes. It's just, it's so bizarre. But anyway, there's that whole threat envelope way of seeing things. But where you said, Will, is that also openness keeps technology, in the private, sorry, in the, in the public sphere, private markets, not public, you know, not the, defense or an intelligence community kind of, spheres. And I think that's a.

That's a more expansive kind of context beyond the immediate threat. So do we think that the threat envelope perspective is needed to drive the motivation for the more nuanced reason for being open with technologies?

Will Zeng (25:10.412)
I think they both help. They go together. look, I want to give another important thing about this Google announcement is actually for each of one of these disclosures, people, the people who disclose them have started to comment more specifically about doing this responsibly. We want to release a credible new lower bound for how good of a quantum computer you need to break encryption. But you don't necessarily want to give people a blueprint because we to have enough time to do the upgrade.

And so Google did this really great thing where they actually released a zero knowledge proof that they had the circuits of sufficient size that was able to break it without releasing the details. And guess what they used to build up that zero knowledge proof and release it publicly. A bunch of open source software from the classical crypto community. And so these things kind of all stack in kind of interesting ways.

Sebastian Hassinger (26:07.975)
It's interesting. so, you know, when Will talks about the need for a lot of maturity in the software stack, the kind of toolkit that Google just used from the open source crypto, classical crypto world, Ziad, does the metaphor of a quantum Linux, does that resonate for you and for Mozilla?

Ziyaad Bhorat (26:30.264)
It does. think we're, from a Mozilla standpoint, still ways away from developing that, as we say, learn by doing. And a lot of our work is just focused on making sure we're connecting communities in the space right now. But it tracks how we generally think about the role of open source in general.

It is in the enablement layer. It is not intentioned necessarily with proprietary offers and platforms.

products and tools and systems, but it should be the enablement layer for a lot of what we see out in the field and in the market in particular. And so to develop something like that would be a dream. To have something like that would be a dream, but it should be the enablement layer rather than something that is an offshoot down the line.

Sebastian Hassinger (27:24.209)
That makes sense. The one thing that phrase is compelling quantum Linux. But the thing that occurs to me is also Linux succeed in large part because it's scratched an itch for a large community of developers. We don't have, as you said, well, in the quantum community at the moment, we all know each other pretty much. The goal is to get to the point where we don't know each other. I like that framing. does the...

Does the Linux metaphor hold in that kind of smaller, sparser community or is a different sort of approach required at that stage?

Will Zeng (28:04.75)
Yeah, I mean, wouldn't try and like read into the specific detail. It's not like we're going to do exactly Linux. The operating systems look different. It's like we're in a world where maybe all the software is going to be written by AI. to me, means like Linux is significant software for the industry in many ways, the standard, going through a branching, but a standard critical piece of software that people need and use that's open source. And we want to have, and it doesn't have to be one piece of software. could be a bunch of things that relate to each other.

That's what we want to have because that is what enables a lower activation energy to start new companies because you can use that software. It makes it easier to study and develop and do research. Maybe another example, like we had a microgram project pretty early on in Unity Foundation called PyMatching. So when you have a quantum computer, it has a bunch of noise, errors accumulate and you want to correct those, noise. You take some measurements and then you try to infer

using something called the decoding algorithm on a regular piece of classical software, what corrections you need to make to fix the errors that have accumulated in the quantum computer. And there was this pretty well known algorithm for doing decoding and like code that people like to study a lot, but the only available implementation was like under this software license. I mean, it wasn't crazy expensive if you were a company.

But particularly at the time, several years ago, like not everybody was in a company. They were researchers or you were some graduate student and like the process of like, how do you get budget to sign up and get this license, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so Oscar Higgett applied for one of our micro grants to build in kind of both better in Python and open source, easy license implementation of the algorithm, because the algorithm's been around for a while. And that unlocked a whole bunch more research into quantum error correcting codes.

Sebastian Hassinger (29:50.62)
Hmm.

Will Zeng (29:54.286)
And the field of error correction is very big right now. And a lot of them use a bunch of open source software. Some of it from our micro-panel, some of it things like Stim. And I'm not going to say that's like a million developer community using Linux, but kind of the core tools for studying error correction are now based on pieces of open source software. And those will go into the software that runs the quantum computers to do the error correction.

And if that's more open, then it'll advance faster and more excessively. so it's all built. So it comes back to like what Ziav was saying earlier, intervening early is a lot less expensive. I love people who don't have a capital. It's like, how can I spend my money somewhere where someone else isn't just do it, isn't going to step in and just do it and where it's likely to have a big impact right now? And if we are in a world where the only quantum computers are under lock and key in some miso silo.

Sebastian Hassinger (30:24.657)
Right.

Sebastian Hassinger (30:32.761)
Right. Right.

Will Zeng (30:50.894)
pulling them out is gonna be really expensive.

Sebastian Hassinger (30:53.297)
Yeah. You touched on something that also is focused on in the paper, which the, a condition in the quantum market right now where people who may be writing code are kind of stuck between the academic world and the startup world or the VC backed world where the academic world rewards and that's, know, NSF funding, DOE funding, Horizon, Okre, all the various public sector.

sources of funding, they reward publishing papers, research papers over running code. And then the venture community, the private capital community rewards products and paths to ROI over something of sort of more broad social good. Ziad, you mentioned sort of the challenge being the technical depth of quantum at this stage. Are there...

Areas from Mozilla's experience that look the same in terms of being stuck between academia and private capital or other sorts of, know, Valley of Death type constructions that open source and Mozilla can help sort of bridge.

Ziyaad Bhorat (32:06.64)
Yeah, and it's something we've actually explicitly oriented around at the foundation. We now have an incubator aimed at the Valley of Death, focused on product community fit instead of product market fit. So should tell you a little bit about how our intervention space is now positioned and what we aim to do at the foundation in particular. We've seen this with AI, right? I keep coming back to it because unfortunately it is the comparator. Fortunately, one, unfortunately, it is the comparator right now in this broad-tent bucket of

Sebastian Hassinger (32:17.937)
Hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (32:32.418)
Yes.

Ziyaad Bhorat (32:36.956)
tech. So we do see that with AI in particular, interventions in private markets are sometimes accelerating faster than the capacities that we see at universities. There's talent implications between the two as well, playing out in all kinds of ways, some of them healthy, some of them not so healthy, changing incentives to get involved in higher education, for example.

there's a lot of a distortionary effect that you can just even learn from in the case of AI. And that's why I think makes it such a fertile and a fantastic space to be involved in the quantum conversation is because at least, different world, but there are some analytic components that can be carried forward. And so what I mentioned earlier was not just only private markets, venture capital,

academic institutions, but to really have a community, you have to have a sense of purpose and shared belief, right? And so that's why I think like, even the artistic communities that are embracing this are doing so much to translate what is pretty heavy technical understanding into self understanding. And so when you start to have that kind of be a part of this broader tent community, you actually start to see that form in a more cohesive way.

And so that is actually a learning that we had with AI as we start to see artists get more and more involved from skepticism to kind of self understanding communities are built when you have this broader tent of focal bringing kind of the full picture of the system together. So that's what I would say in terms of how we've seen and what the comparators are, but it's not only, you know, in the AI space, there are some fantastic things also happening in VR and XR in particular.

which I'm talking about on Friday. So there's a lot of new tech out in the space with underlying social and societal change dynamics. And so it's just a really exciting time to be honest with you, to be involved. And I think quantum field and open source quantum is just such a ripe opportunity for asserting a positive vision and just kind of sticking to it.

Sebastian Hassinger (34:43.229)
Hmm.

Ziyaad Bhorat (34:57.626)
That's what I'm excited about.

Sebastian Hassinger (35:00.221)
That's great. That's great.

Will Zeng (35:01.23)
And speaking to it is complicated too. mean, not necessarily because it's more really difficult to keep doing a good thing, but you have to keep evolving. We started around a microgram program eight years ago. The quantum technology industry is totally different than it was eight years ago. It's going to be totally different in another four or five years or eight years. And one of the reasons we're teaming up with Mozilla and putting out this white paper is to put out the call that actually things have gone pretty well so far. I mean, of course we would have wanted quantum to be.

developing faster and the fact, you know, it could always be faster, but, but it's gone pretty well. We've made pretty solid progress. It looks like products is going to continue. But if we want to stay on this track of developing big, valuable economic impacts across industries with quantum, then us at Unitarion, the open source community is going to need to keep up. Like we're also going to need to grow. And we were not able to do the things that the companies are doing now, like go public on NASDAQ to raise enormous sums of resources in order to do that.

Sebastian Hassinger (35:30.758)
you

Will Zeng (35:59.702)
So we want to put out the call that we are looking for partners to help support us continue to grow along with the rest of the industry. And that includes a lot of those companies who are now going to work on purpose.

Sebastian Hassinger (36:07.965)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want to dig into a bit to Unitary Foundation because I think it's really an extraordinary story. You you mentioned micro grants. think it's 150 plus micro grants over the eight years. They're across something like 30 countries. About 50 % go to underrepresented groups.

Among the projects, so the headline projects are MEDIC and METRIC and Q-TIP and others. What do you think is the highest impact project that the Unitary Foundation has supported and how do you measure that internally at Unitary?

Will Zeng (36:50.542)
Sure. mean, it varies because there's different ways of measuring stuff. So I talked a little bit about, pie matching as an example of open source. There's a couple other pieces of open source software. were these projects around this stuff called the ZX calculus, is like super mathy, graphical approach to compiling that ended up being useful for error correction. And we, we funded some of the original packages that like this one called pie ZX that took some of this funky mathy stuff that was like a little bit on its own.

and made it again into a Python package that you could just put into some compiler workflow that you had. And then people realized like, this actually works pretty well. And you can sort of black box the mathy part of it. And so there's been a bunch of stuff around ZX. It's in several of the corporate software stacks and compiler stacks. It's relevant for error correction research.

Sebastian Hassinger (37:32.445)
Hmm.

Will Zeng (37:44.578)
And so that's a good example of the scalability of the kind of stuff that we can fund. Like software, not just like, it doesn't just make it open. makes it composable. Like when you take, yeah, that's in a paper and you put it into a library that I can just import and play with instead of necessarily having to learn it all. Like an on-ramp to that idea that can then help it scale. so I.

Sebastian Hassinger (37:53.17)
Mm.

Sebastian Hassinger (38:04.465)
That's where you can see the accretive power right there, right? mean, it's like, once you, that research paper is turned into a reusable library of code, then the next person doesn't have to, they can just start from that and move forward instead of having to recapitulate the work.

Will Zeng (38:19.79)
Yeah. And they can convince themselves that it's worth learning because they can just try it out with a few lines and be oh, this kind of work, now I should learn what it does. That's how people really operate. And there's other kinds of things we fund too. I mean, we funded this organization called Q World that's become its own standalone nonprofit. They build up educational materials about quantum programming and quantum software and teach courses. they've, like, actually don't even remember, like thousands of students have gone through this in like 20 countries where they've established different chapters.

Sebastian Hassinger (38:24.637)
Right.

Right.

Will Zeng (38:49.23)
Those, there's sort of two ways to think about the impact there. One is just like, how many people did they talk to? But it's also like how many people from that community or from other micro grants then went on to work in the quantum computing industry. And there's a lot of these, like our microgrants are not that big. They're $4,000. Usually they're kind of six month projects, you know, it kind of varies because people propose different times, but six months and $4,000 is a lot faster.

Sebastian Hassinger (39:15.813)
Okay.

Will Zeng (39:16.682)
on ramp to a meaningful job in quantum technology than a bunch of other approaches. And we just have too much to build to be credentialist to say, go get a PhD, which is not even necessarily the thing you're supposed to. Like there's no, it's a few places that do research in quantum software, but like most quantum software, lot of the headline, the front lines of building it are in these companies and there's no class to take that teaches you how to do it. You just got to go do it. And open source software is a place to show that you can do the real thing. And there's no gatekeepers like.

Anyone can go on the GitHub, solve an issue, prove that they can do it, and get a job more quickly than they might think.

Sebastian Hassinger (39:55.325)
I see you nodding and I imagine you're, mean, Will is preaching to the choir with you. You sound like they're like 100 % aligned with sort of Mozilla values and strategies, I would assume.

Ziyaad Bhorat (40:09.168)
I if I have to tell you, it was part of a multi-year petition on my part to make sure we got involved in the space. should not be five years. I restarted years ago and I was like, I love what you're doing. You know, it's very early stage, very early stage for how we're thinking about, you know, some of the things that are immediate right now in the ecosystem. AI just being one of it, right? Like there's a lot going on in the tech space right now, but I see the opportunity space. I see what you're building.

are real, they're very much aligned. How do we plug in? And so it took some time, but here we are and I'm just so grateful to be a part of it.

Will Zeng (40:48.098)
And I think, look, I think the kind of thing Mozilla is recognizing with their new incubator, that there's kind of this gap, we kept talking about this gap, gap between kind of like research and, and like a sort of venture fundable company stuff. Other people are recognizing it too. You know, there's been this movement around focused research organizations, lot of stuff, the virgin research done. And the NSF has put out this call for these things called tech labs, which, you know, are to get some of the benefits of a startup structure like stable.

funding, sort of management and founder driven, but not for something that's going to become a business. mean, it's going to produce like public goods technology. I think the tech labs initiative is fantastic. We wrote an RFI, an Interchain Foundation about how it could apply in quantum, particularly around quantum software. think there's a big opportunity there. I will say, I think we were all expecting their call for proposals to come out last month.

and it has not come out. I really hope, I think it's a great initiative. I hope it happens. I hope it happens soon.

Sebastian Hassinger (41:50.353)
It wouldn't be the first thing to be moving on a slightly slower timeline in the US government in recent days. So I'm, I'm still hopeful.

Will Zeng (41:56.622)
Yeah, indeed. But this is the exact sort of thing that people, you know, I think sometimes voters wonder about like, okay, there's a bunch of great PDFs that are like, have a lot of great ideas in them. But like, how do we get those into stuff that I see? And this could do that.

Sebastian Hassinger (42:17.519)
And the Unitary Foundation also has a long history of leveraging public funding. I think one of our first conversations was around the DOE funded, if I recall correctly, effort that turned into MEDIC. And you've also got metric, which I think has had some public sector funding.

You mentioned composable. That's why I'm bringing up those two examples because they're both frameworks that are very purposefully meant to be expansive and, um, and open the, you know, lower the cost of entry to a particular area, uh, error mitigation with midic and benchmarking with metric. Why do you think metric was just has done a major release, which makes it even more, I think accessible as an on-ramp. Why do you think, why does the unitary foundation think that

benchmarking, either benchmarking itself or that framework, that approach to a framework in general is important at this stage.

Will Zeng (43:21.432)
Sure. Maybe before I talk about benchmarking, I'll just talk about some of the public grant and collaboration stuff. Often we find great partners and they've got a lot of great ideas. They want to write great papers. And we say, look, why don't we help you take the paper you built an MVP with some sciency code for, start plugging these together into something that other people can use and build upon. Be that another researcher at some other university or a company.

Sebastian Hassinger (43:37.415)
You

Will Zeng (43:48.832)
or yourself in four years when you like forgot. And so kind of upgrading into composable software, because a lot of the fantastic academic and research ideas, because there's tons still like there's like this is quantum information is the fastest growing division of the American society, physics society, like, there's tons of research ideas, we just want to start creating them into into

That's a role that we play a lot. It's great that funding agencies and some philanthropists and private sector entities recognize that value because it's been super high leverage. Benchmarking is kind of its own sort of complicated public good. At a high level, all these stakeholders want to know how quantum computing is doing.

It might be somebody who's worried about getting decrypted. might be policymakers who are like, we keep putting money into this. Is it working? It could be users who are saying like, when is this going to be useful for my use case? It might be someone who's a software engineer in AI who's going, I kind of want to do something new, but is this quantum thing happening or not? Is it improving? And benchmarking is hard in quantum because

We have no standards really. I mean, we're better than we were five years ago, but there's not like a flops. There's not like standard numbers that like everybody runs. And, part of that's because a lot of the research community is incentivized to come up with new benchmarks because a new benchmark gets you a novel paper running exists. And marks is kind of by definition, not the thing that's going to get published. So there's this, there's this gap. Um, and so we've been trying to help fill the gap and the approach we've taken with this sweet.

Sebastian Hassinger (45:29.094)
Yes.

Will Zeng (45:43.016)
of metric tools, websites, metric.info is to just start posting publicly sort of like geek bench style runs of suites of open source benchmarks. So the software is called metric gym. There's a bunch of benchmarks in there. We know they're not perfect, but we think they're correlated with improving progress. We're looking for feedback on how to do those benchmarks, what the benchmark should be, how to make the benchmarks better, but also people who want to help us run them on new bits of hardware.

And then we kind of compare and roll them up into this sort of summary score. But of course you can, you can dive into it in more detail on the metric info website, if you have particular things you care about. And so what we're going to do over time, we're, you know, we work with a lot of people in the ecosystem around how to do this is keep running it and we'll keep running it on hardware and show that things are getting better and kind of at what rate.

And, and then we're going to keep upgrading the benchmark suite itself. And maybe I'll just kind of end with like one, I think, good analogy that Scott Aronson made for like how benchmarking can go pretty wrong in quantum computing, which is that a lot of people with respect to cryptography have kept saying things like, well, like what's the biggest number you can find.

And the biggest number we factored on a quantum computer is tiny, maybe it's 35. And did we even do, we kind of cheated or like whatever.

Sebastian Hassinger (47:06.223)
Yeah, I think 21 end to end is the largest.

Will Zeng (47:09.71)
Yeah. So, and like that number is not like, nobody's really running small examples of shorts. Like we're not even trying to do that. Um, and Scott Arntz summarized this in a way that I think is very apt, which is like going to the Manhattan project in 1943 and saying, have like, have you even made a small nuclear bomb?

Sebastian Hassinger (47:28.923)
Right. How many Adams did you split today? One?

Will Zeng (47:33.774)
how many atoms are floating in the air? Because that's just not how it's going to work. We're going to get systems that fall tolerant at scale, and then pretty quickly the key size that you can do is going to grow. And it's a little binary. You hit a key size that's practically over the top of your And so picking good benchmarks is important. And explaining the context around them to the broadest stakeholder community of people who look at quantum technologies is the...

Sebastian Hassinger (47:59.005)
Yeah, yeah. I like that example because, as you said, benchmarking is complex, but it's also, it strikes me as something that uniquely an open source community can, is well suited for, right? Because if a vendor is driving a benchmark, you always have to question why that benchmark from that vendor. If there's a, you know,

a commercial effort to do it, there's always going to be that question of what's the motivation. And in an open source community driven effort like this, the motivation is the exploration of the question without some sort of preconceived notion of what the answer is. want to get out of it, right? mean, that seems sort of like a canonical example. Why open source? So, so I want to get to the point like where

You know, the white paper is great. It's a great framing mechanism. there specific, know, like Ziad, when you think about, you know, program officers at major foundations who may have a budget available, like what's your sort of pitch to them? Where should they put that money if they, if they're interested in exploring the impact that quantum technologies can have or open source can have for, for quantum.

Ziyaad Bhorat (49:21.936)
I have been saying, so this is active conversation to my colleagues as well, so great call out there, is do not be afraid to experiment. think in this moment in time in particular, we can sometimes be very slow in philanthropy.

Sebastian Hassinger (49:24.637)
Great.

Ziyaad Bhorat (49:39.941)
And we're doing ourselves a disservice to be slow, especially in a space that really warrants experimentation. And so deploying funds into the field is our way of showing that something can be demonstrated and we should act accordingly. So that's what I would say to my colleagues who have budgets. This is an exciting field. We've seen what happened with AI and the kind of consolidation of power around.

in Frontier Labs and hyperscalers. Do we want that world? We're actively working to address it now almost after the fact, but do we want that world in quantum? It's not a one-for-one comparator, we know that, but there are enough analytic components where we should say to ourselves, well, what if we had acted earlier and more quickly and with more conviction about the fact that we're not afraid to experiment? And so that's what I would say is learn by doing. It's really important to unlock that catalytic capital and learn by doing.

Will Zeng (50:37.774)
And maybe, and I hate, I'm going to say something that's a little bit on the, the, the fear side, but as much as people worry about the consolidation of AI, could have been a lot worse. A lot of the, or a lot of the origins of open source machine learning software, like go back a long ways. Like a lot of it was developed in open source. Like there's reasons there are open models at all. Didn't, didn't have to be that way. And it's not guaranteed to be that way.

Ziyaad Bhorat (50:46.916)
Yep.

Sebastian Hassinger (50:47.047)
Yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger (50:58.076)
Right.

Will Zeng (51:03.682)
for quantum, like some people made that happen in AI, maybe we want more, but like, you know, could have been even more closed. And so that's worth keeping in mind too.

Sebastian Hassinger (51:11.869)
Yeah, yeah, very good point. And we'll continue with you. if you mentioned the role of public sector, the NQIs coming up for reauthorization finally. Are there specific policy asks either in the US or in Europe or just globally that you think would help this particular moment in quantum technologies?

Will Zeng (51:36.526)
Yeah, think the main thing is that papers can't be the only benchmark for public goods research. It's not just citations. Like you've got to be funding people to make things that people use to borrow something from the venture capital world. It does not make you worry about if they're paying for it. And so these new NQI programs, new funding for quantum should include

Sebastian Hassinger (51:53.638)
Right.

Will Zeng (52:04.0)
software components and for that, some of the success should be users, contributors, like that kind of stuff. And it's not something that these program offices are always so used to tracking, but it's backable. If they have questions about how to do it, come talk to us. I'm willing to carry out foundation.

Sebastian Hassinger (52:26.981)
And Ziad, same question for you. Any sort of, because you're coming at it from a broader sort of starting point, open source technology starting point, anything from your perspective that would be a call to action for public policy that would help quantum at this stage?

Ziyaad Bhorat (52:46.498)
I would say, and this is based on actual kind of conversations I've had with policymakers, which is, don't be afraid. Do not think of quantum as, you know, this.

massive security threat that needs to be under lock and key because that was an argument put forward for AI and was resoundingly and continues to be proven wrong as a result of the move towards open weight and open source models. We need to have both, right? We need to be investing in the full kind of stack. And what I had seen earlier with quantum was this kind of fear of even talking about it in an open source sense because, you know,

security implications were just not communicated effectively enough to policymakers along the lines of what open source actually enables. And so I would say tap your friendly quantum technologist and actually have the conversation on why it's important to build a vibrant community that can actually debug live the way you can actually be transparent about what's being put out into the field.

so that you don't create massive security choke points or critical fools in one isolated container of the world.

Sebastian Hassinger (54:04.989)
That's great. Okay, so let's imagine for a moment that all of the calls to action in the paper and from Mozilla and from Use Harry Foundations are heated and the world is perfect. What does the, I said use your imagination. What do you think the quantum software landscape looks like in 2030 given that fantasy?

Ziyaad Bhorat (54:23.642)
you.

Ziyaad Bhorat (54:32.686)
I love this question. I want Will to answer it. I want Will's full imagination of the future.

Sebastian Hassinger (54:37.261)
Me too.

Will Zeng (54:40.27)
Look, I think we have a world where there's a lot of companies competing to build better and better quantum computers. And there's a lot of companies competing to use them with a bunch of software and that you can start a company in a garage that has a new way to use quantum computers. Because gosh, hasn't that been so impactful for normal computers? And so I want us to be able to do that for quantum computers too. And I think we're going to invent a lot of new stuff once we understand how quantum physics works better and we can see.

quantum computers to make that happen. And I want young people from around the world who are super smart, no matter where they live, to, if they don't have a garage, get on the internet and start that, be able to start that company that use a quantum computers.

Sebastian Hassinger (55:27.197)
That's great. You you mentioned the HPC example from the white paper. I think I'd close with what in my mind is the best example of an argument for open versus closed, which is von Neumann at Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies versus ENIAC. And when both systems were operational, if somebody asked von Neumann, how'd you build that? He'd run off a copy of the white paper, which was the entire spec.

and there ended up being something like 50 or 60 clones of the, the IAS system. And if anybody even came close to the ENIAC system, they would sue them. And today we have von Neumann machines in our pockets and who knows what the architecture of the ENIAC was. I don't. So the point that you made to think about openness being the best recipe for, you know, incredible value creation in.

the open in the public markets, in venture backed startups, in academic settings is to me, like it's incontrovertible. So I think, you know, the teaming up of Mozilla foundation, Unitary Foundation is a great thing. And I want to thank you both for your time here today. It's been a great conversation.

Will Zeng (56:46.616)
Thank you, Sebastian.

Ziyaad Bhorat (56:47.578)
much. Appreciate it.

Will Zeng (56:49.964)
See you guys.

Sebastian Hassinger (56:49.977)
All right.