Sachin and Adam
00:37:06 · Pete Shadbolt
[00:37:06] S0: Yeah, it's a great question. And I think, you know, the I have to confess my novice level comprehension of geopolitics, But what does seem very apparent to me is that the world is increasingly moving into a regime where power is captured on the frontier. The frontier of advanced technology, the frontier of scale, like... Again, ten years ago, nobody, no politician really cared about a fab. Now they all know that it's extremely important that TSMC is located in Taiwan. And we see this across various different regimes, as you described. AI supercomputers have the same dynamics. Energy has, of course, profound geopolitical implication. And I think that quantum computing is going to have the same kind of dynamics. And that's a function of our earlier discussion. Were it the case that small quantum computers could be profoundly impactful, you wouldn't have to worry about geopolitics. And you guys are very familiar with the discourse around open source models and edge AI computing, blah, blah. It's a very sympathetic idea. Like, we're all going to have our own small models and it's all going to be democratized. And that would be a lot less geopolitically intense were that the case. Again, I'm not an expert, but at least from my point of view, it doesn't seem to be going that way. It seems as though the foundation models, they really have the power and you need billions and billions and billions of dollars of GPUs to capture that power. And I don't see that changing, at least at the moment. Quantum computing, unfortunately, has the same dynamics. Fabs have the same dynamics. Everyone wants to build a small fab. It's a nice thing to do. But the power, the geopolitics is dominated by the tier one fabs. And they're bloody expensive, and there's just nothing you can do about that. And and so I think... And and, again, it's amazing to think, like, that is coming from the most foundational pieces of microscopic physics. Like the power that TSMC has is rooted in the fact that they can make transistors that are a few nanometres in scale. It's really amazing, like nation states, geopolitics, you know, this scary grand stuff is being controlled by something that's the size of, you know, a few atoms. And that to me seems like a real trend. And quantum computing, of course, fits firmly into that trend.
00:39:53 · Pete Shadbolt, Sachin
We're going to gain mastery over the microscopic foundations of our world. You need a big old machine to do that, unfortunately, and we think that's going to be geopolitically significant. [00:40:08] S1: Once we get one of these machines up and running, which sounds like it'll be sooner than ever on things, who actually gets to decide what these things are used for? [00:40:17] S0: The market will decide. If someone's paying real money, like serious money for something, that's a pretty good signal that it probably is useful and if that's sustained, then I'll believe it. Of course, there's an entire academic apparatus that is extremely well equipped to differentiate between uses of quantum computers that are mere demo and applications that are really impactful relative to conventional supercomputing. And that benchmarking and evaluation exercise is ongoing. We work with DARPA on a lot of that work, but there are many other organisations that we engage with and that are doing beautiful work to really deeply understand the technical benchmarking. But yeah, ultimately, in my opinion, the true test is going to be whether people pay for it. [00:41:14] S1: Do you think these things are too powerful for capitalism to decide?
00:41:14 · Sachin, Pete Shadbolt, Adam Miller
[00:41:14] S1: Do you think these things are too powerful for capitalism to decide? [00:41:22] S0: Trying to suppress a wry smile. Do I think that that these machines are too powerful for capitalism to decide how they're deployed? No. It's fine. Like, my my favorite examples on this are things like GPS, radar, laser, strong encryption. Like, these are all powerful technologies. They were all developed partly by governments for defense applications, but also in collaboration with industry. They were all export control at some point because people were worried about their applications. Still, if you take your GPS module above 10,000 feet, it turns off because it thinks it's in a [00:42:11] S1: cruise [00:42:11] S0: missile. But all of those technologies also have proliferated out into the world and have been overwhelmingly much more valuable in a civilian context than anywhere else. You got GPS in your phone, you use strong encryption every day, you got a laser in your CD player if you still have one, you got radar in your car. And I think quantum computing has very much the same dynamics where this does have profound national security implications. But I think the spectrum of civilian applications is much broader and importantly, ultimately more commercially lucrative. So I actually think that capitalism is what is going to turn this thing overwhelmingly into a good thing for the world. [00:42:56] S3: Pete, I think the question on the top of everyone's mind is when will we see useful quantum computers actually in the world?
00:43:05 · Pete Shadbolt
[00:43:05] S0: Yeah. So most teams are now aligning around a roadmap towards the end of the decade. If you just look across the hyperscalers, the public quantum computing companies, and just look at all of these roadmaps, they're all aligning pretty close to the end of the decade, give or take a few years. And we're no different to that. There are existing quantum computers today, of course, like there are small machines out there that you can play around with, but that's really the consensus actually of the industry on when we will have truly useful systems. Now, I think it's not too confrontational to say you shouldn't expect everyone to get there. You should also expect that various of these efforts are delayed, but it is saying something that pretty much every organisation is getting aligned around that sort of timeline. And I think it's actually very encouraging, not only that there's consensus, but also that these teams are moving their focus from building benchtop science experiments basically to actually getting serious about building these very large machines. And I think it's very healthy because so many of the challenges that you mentioned are actually very aligned. So the networking, the cooling, the manufacturing, there are synergies amongst the different technologies where we all benefit from this sort of new attention on scale. And so I think that's really going to help us actually stick to those kind of timelines and get the machine built, yeah.
00:44:49 · Sachin
[00:44:49] S1: We're about to go and do the tour in a second, but I think the place to finish this conversation up would be if you could just blank slate dream of the one use case that you would want when you guys are eventually successful, what is that? I know it is hard to conceptualise and there a lot of unknown unknowns, but if you just wanted to riff for a second on like there must be one use case where in your mind or when the days are tough that you keep coming back to.
00:45:15 · Pete Shadbolt, Sachin
[00:45:15] S0: Yes. Was very interesting. Obviously, in the last few weeks, we've heard a lot of people talking about oil and energy and the geopolitics of energy and so on. And I caught somebody talking about fertilizer again. And why are they talking about fertilizer in the context of energy? And you guys, I'm sure, know this, but a lot of people don't. Depending on how organic your diet is, 50% of the nitrogen in your body, more than half of the nitrogen in your body, was probably made in an industrial process for making fertilizer, the Haber Bosch process, which consumes a huge fraction not a huge fraction, but a significant fraction of global natural gas. So we make nitrogen fixing fertilizer by burning natural gas, and that's how we feed ourselves. And suddenly you see like fertilizer prices are linked to energy production. And so one of the applications of a quantum computer is going to be to understand the chemistry at the root of these kind of processes. And, you know, there is a historical track record for this where we have found like Haber Bosch, where did that come from? It's just some German guys, like, find a new process and now we can feed millions and millions of more people. But that's a very nondeterministic discovery process, the same as the way we find drugs, the same as the way we find catalysts. And so, you know, the grand vision is that we just stop doing that kind of flailing around in the dark and that we're able to deterministically design these things properly. [00:47:20] S1: So a new infrastructure for the whole scientific method?