okay ready okay yeah imagine a computer that could solve the world's biggest problems
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a computer that could simulate novel materials to help sequester carbon from the Earth's atmosphere
will help us develop new low-cost fertilizers that require less energy and less fossil fuels
to produce now there isn't a conventional supercomputer on Earth capable of solving
these problems but Quantum Computing is a new form of computation that harnesses
the power of quantum mechanics and is expected to solve problems beyond the reach of today's
classical computer so how does it harness quantum mechanics Finn it uses the law of superposition
and entanglement yeah I guess that's all that needs to be said really eh basically you just
have to entangle things together that's that I guess you could say what is superposition and
entanglement really quickly for people who don't really know or have heard the misinformation
which is plenty I'll do entanglement and you can do superposition okay okay entanglement
you can have two things and say say you get two balls and you one is red and one
is blue and you put them in one box and then you're like shake the Box up and then without
opening the box you somehow turn the one box into two boxes and you move those boxes really far
apart they're still closed so you don't know which one is the red one and which one is the blue one
those two are entangled and so the one box on the other side of the globe as soon as the guy opens
it and sees that it's a blue ball he'll know that the other one is red but before he opens
it they're both technically equally likely to be both blue and red done how was that that was sick
superpositions way simpler and you don't need to go into like any special stories it's just you can
have things in multiple States at the same time and that's about it in multiple places as well so
you know you think about an atom and the things around the atom and they're like specific things
like spin they're not really spinning but they can be doing all kinds of things all at the same time
you may have heard of the wave function which is kind of how we describe uh say an electron that's
that's not going to help you really understand anything but like you know you could kind of
think of the electron being in multiple places at the same time uh it's due to the way you know
this wave function uh we call that superposition essentially uh and you can when you do the actual
quantum mechanics of it like the actual math because of the superposition stuff you can do
really like funky stuff and that's probably enough to like get people to go look into it further
yeah with this nascent technology we aim to create a supercomputer that seamlessly integrates Quantum
and classical power together the same way that today's computers integrate both CPUs and gpus
we call this Quantum Centric super computing and our vision to build up so we should pause here
because like what's been the approach for a while Finn with quality Computing and why is this a big
announcement to explain this better than anyone if you get what I'm trying to like get out of you
I'll give you a hint right for a long time right we've been trying to build a quantum
computer that's very just separate this its own little thing right whereas here they're kind of
announcing okay we're going to step away from that we're just going to try and create this
qpu like a little chip a Quantum Computing chip sort of thing and put it in a supercomputer
right and create an architecture of a normal computer with this little
component which can do this utilize Quantum stuff whereas you know for a
long time we were thinking all right we're just going to create a separate computer
entirely Quantum computationally sort of thing yes so I guess for me this idea is lit it's it's maybe
new to people that aren't in the field but this conversation about less about Quantum Computing
and more about architecture last year I went to a conference the dog walls conference and the
plenary speaker talked about this where actually we thought that we'd build this big huge machine
and it would solve all the world's problems but um the world's problems are actually a lot
simpler you don't need one big machine to solve everything you can have like a bunch of little
machines that a hybrid like added on kind of thing it's more Dynamic I guess it's kind of like the
human civilization right yeah yeah so let's keep watching the 100 viewbit Quantum Centric
supercomputer by 2033 so that the world can start tackling its biggest problems this system will
look nothing like the quantum Computing that we have today to achieve this kind of scale and power
we need to develop more advanced engineering further research into fundamental physics and
push at the very well we should say they're kind of giving up on some things here like Google is
aiming they have stated publicly many times that they want to build a million qubit device by 2028.
you can just Google this it's on Google's website and so what I and IBM have been chasing that as
well and they've said the same thing and they just released the is it the eagle or the Osprey the 433
qubit device only a few months ago now which is the largest sort of little chip in terms of qubits
and in terms of quantum Computing in general but there's been a lot of kind of pushback on
how big that achievement really is because they're not really connected in a sense and
um there's not really any Quantum error correction and all of these terms there's so much jargon to
it but it's like you can't just keep scaling this up because the error correction problem isn't been
sorted and until we get the algorithms or the error correction because when you're dealing
with Quantum stuff on you know at the very small scale for people who don't know what I'm
talking about it's very hard to harness like these superpositions and entanglements you have to cool
things down so things are barely moving errors pop up a lot like a lot of errors and so it's very
hard to create a computer that's reliable without errors and that's kind of what I'm talking about
so they have to come up with these algorithms to kind of skip over the errors whenever there's like
qubits where there's like a problem and so you need an algorithm to go all right ignore
these ones you know and that's that's really difficult and we're still trying to do that so
bring it back to where I started saying this IBM have kind of gone all right new plan guys
they're kind of listening to the physicist because as finger said physicists for a while
have been thinking how about we why aren't we just focusing on the architecture of a normal computer
he's told me some stories about this as well which is awesome so yeah I think this is actually like
a really big announcement because this is one of the biggest players right and they're like
all right we're gonna we're gonna aim for that now yeah there's there's definitely this bridge
between the business and this the science kind of thing that for a long time because
quantum physics is so difficult to explain to someone that doesn't specialize in that
justifying like why aren't you trying to produce this as many qubits as possible and put them
on a computer chip and have a whole computer running trying to justify that has been like
very challenging I'm trying to think how much I am allowed to talk about because I went to
the University of Sydney and they are doing some stuff there the team there that works for
Microsoft and there are it's in published papers a lot of them so it's actually I am allowed to talk
about it but I won't say like exactly what they're doing but essentially they were diverging from
qubit architecture and focusing a lot on oh cryogenics and working like creating tools
that were like really good tools for operating like either cooling stuff down really quickly
or having really good SMA connectors which sounds like oh what's an SMA connector thing basically
they were making wires that work really well in cryogenic temperatures so they don't have this
noise this feedback that you're talking about they're they're people that are confused right
now cryogenic temperatures like near absolute zero Kelvin yeah not zero degrees Celsius like
negative 270 degrees Celsius right Finn yeah very cold um but you know and people are like oh but
that's boring right like you're just working on a fancy cable but actually this fancy cable
is insanely useful because there's a a hundred thousand people working on the fancy computer
sometimes you just need like the simple thing to work better for it to like be super Innovative
and it's all helpful yeah yeah well cryogenics are used for heaps of [ __ ] and I don't think people
who if you don't know much about physics you might not appreciate zero Kelvin or like what it
means to like try and approach that it's actually theoretically impossible to get to zero Kelvin for
instance and you're approaching like a limit of nature right like it's it's wild but to get off
that and to someone said Checker said I thought this would be the idea of future technology to
have computers or even phones with qpu so you kind of I mean yeah computers but you probably phones
probably not going to happen this is what so what they're talking about is like a supercomputer
super computers people don't just have super computers in their phones or even
their laptops at all even today that's not a thing so you know like Cooper use no no
um supercomputers are things we log into like if you want to do really intense calculations and
they're still like the size of a small house like the one I had access to at swinburne University
which I was doing all the Universe simulations on was literally the size of a small house the
computer and it had a picture of Einstein watching a black hole on it it was so sick I wish I got a
picture in front of it but I didn't yeah we don't even have super computers and phones or anything
so I I don't know why you think you're gonna have a cube and a qpu is even harder because like you
can't just stick a little dilution fridge in your phone you know like uh that's maybe impossible
if you want a qpu you need room temperature qubits how close are we should we talk about that paper
that's really controversial that um blamed you know from Australia as well who have you know
getting achieved some kind of room temperature superconductor did you remember that you sent me
that yeah it's been a while ago I haven't it was a lot of pushback on it if it actually came to pass
like everyone would know about it yeah like good room temperature qubits that don't have some sort
of drawback or limitation but things are just too hot at room temperature too bouncy yeah so
it might be actually in principle impossible to put a QP uniform uh for instance is what
we're saying we don't know the physics of it so people say who want to go out there and be like
oh nothing's impossible well yeah we have to still follow the laws of physics very edges of computer
science and Quantum information Theory we have a lot of work ahead of us but we already have the
first building blocks for Quantum Centric super computing it's called IBM Quantum system 2. we
shared our designs I feel like that's not fair to call it the edge of computer science because it's
like this is very much the edge of physics what you're trying to do and before you can worry about
the computer science at all it's like you got to get the physics right like we don't even know if
this is they're like they're setting their goals on this right but we can both tell you right now
this might not even be possible do you think this is possible this is like saying we're gonna we're
gonna get a human to Neptune we don't know how we're going to do it we're going to do it 2033
there's a lot of money being put into it and a lot of good things are coming out of it and
until good things stop coming out of it I think the the beauty of quantum physics is like it's
the next evolution in engineering for the human race because you're you're basically manipulating
or your your designing at a at a an atomic and subatomic level which is yeah pretty sick
um whether or not we actually specifically make a quantum computer I don't know well I mean well we
do have quantum computers right don't make that mistake like they do exist it's just a useful
one right yeah because people who aren't in the field they always think you know we don't have
kind of computers it's like no we absolutely do but they can only the what's the largest
number they've factored like 20. I don't think it's much higher than 20 at the moment right so
they're not very useful yeah late 2022 and we're planning to share our first working system in 2023
by connecting multiple Quantum system twos together we plan to create systems of many
thousands of qubits but to continue on the path towards a hundred thousand qubits we'll need
to work hand in hand with the world's finest academic institutions research organizations
and Enterprises so we're proud to announce that the first Partnerships in our journey are with
the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago both leading institutions in the fields
of quantum computer science Quantum components Quantum algorithm design and Quantum communication
together we are taking the first steps to make 2033 a year of quantum Centric super computing
I actually think they're not going to stop their efforts for a million qubit device by 2028 because
they've probably stated that as well I think they're going to like this is just a tangential
project like a backup plan yeah that'll probably take Center Stage yeah this this to me more than
anything feels like a business side of things like the post covered we're re-establishing
our Network we're going to go work with Tokyo and Chicago Chicago they have a guy there he was like
a keynote speaker at this one thing that I went to early last year and his main like research was
partnering with all of these different universities to create on-chip devices as
he called it and so I imagine that when they say Chicago that's the number one guy that they're
collaborating with but I don't even remember his name yeah
um so it's like because the even though it's like big the actual big names which I hope
as I get more dips in the field we'll be more familiar especially now that covert's opened up
and you can go to International conferences and you can meet people face to face and see these
speakers you kind of get an idea of like the who's who in terms of the field like who the
professors are and that sort of thing yeah I think it's it's definitely like they're saying
a lot but they're actually not saying a lot you know like they're just setting a goal it's like
this is our goal that's it they don't explain how any of this stuff works they're like we're
not going to tell you what our problems are but that you know like the the whole way business
works is it fundamentally relies at the end of the day good business on Secrets right they can't
just tell us their secrets yeah yeah otherwise all the other places in the world trying to do
this as well are going to be like all right we're going to do that now copy paste yeah you gotta
they got to give themselves some like a head start before they tell everyone else I guess we'll see