Nobel Prize Winner: What Quantum Computing Does to AI, Bitcoin, and Your Data | John Martinis

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0:45The skills you're building right now are for the AI era, but they have an expiration date. Every few years, something comes along that changes what's actually possible. The internet didn't make libraries faster, it made them irrelevant. relevant. AI didn't make search engines better, it made a completely different way of finding answers. And now we have something that's coming that most people haven't even heard of yet. And it does the same thing to computing itself. In December 2024, Google unveiled a quantum processor that completed a calculation in minutes. That exact calculation that would take today's supercomputers longer than the age of the universe.

1:23And that is a different category of a machine. And here's where it gets a little scary. A few days ago, Google published another paper. They say quantum computers could crack Bitcoin encryption in nine minutes, using 20 times fewer resources than anyone thought. As someone who holds crypto and is curious about implications of quantum on my day-to-day life, I wanted to ask questions. So I was in Davos this January and I met the man whose 1985 discovery made all of this possible. He just won the Nobel prize for it. And President Donald Trump just put him on his science advisory council alongside with Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Jensen Huang.

2:02He's the only scientist in that room and he gave me a timeline. Five to ten years. And to understand why this matters for your career, you need to understand what he actually discovered. Let's talk to John Martinez. I wanted to talk to you about something that you discovered. So I don't have any experience in quantum physics, but the way I I understood it. If you throw a ball against the wall, it bumps, right? Right. But you discovered that an electron can pass the wall without passing it and be on both sides?

2:32John Martinis:Yes. So it's possible that the ball, you know, the wall can tunnel through the wall and not just bounce off, but every once in a while actually tunnel through it. And the way I like to say it is that, you know, people are accustomed to quantum mechanics as the physics of atoms and molecules and microscopic particles. In here, we made an electrical circuit about that big, and the currents and voltages in that big macroscopic electrical circuit is actually obeying quantum mechanics and showing this tundling phenomenon. That's the moment quantum stopped being just theory. He proved it works in machines, and that's what started everything.

3:13So before this discovery, scientists thought quantum mechanics only lived inside atoms. He proved it works in machines. So what does that unlock?

3:23John Martinis:What really happened with this idea, and frankly, it's the reason for the Nobel Prize, is that we took this discovery and then people built on it, built on it. And then the idea of qubits and building a quantum computer came along, which physics naturally fit into this. So it's really kind of the creation of a field of discovery and innovation and technology that these experiments got developed into and why it's important today. Yeah, when you say quantum computer, a lot of people think science fiction. For people who don't know how it affects their daily lives and might affect their daily lives, can you give two or three examples where quantum computers really make a difference?

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5:03John Martinis:The idea I like to talk about is for doing design of materials or molecules or chemistry. And people are very familiar right now how you use computers to design your kitchen, make a mechanical part, design electronic circuit, you know, other things. So you can build it virtually. And then when you go and you build it in the real world, building it virtually in the digital is a lot cheaper and better. And you can think about the tradeoffs. Well, a quantum computer would enable you to do that with molecules and, you know, certain atomic molecules. What about drug discovery? I feel like if we're.

5:55John Martinis:Yes. And the same kind of thing with drug discovery. So if you can simulate the molecules really well, then you can maybe even just gain some insight. I mean, what I've been told is that, for example, to drug discovery, it's very expensive to do this. And if you can improve, let's just say your insight on how the drug works by 1 % or a few percent, that's really valuable and could be worth a lot of money. So it's not like we have to totally change things, but I think just improvements and better insights can be quite valuable for companies. But if we go 10 years forward, what do you think our life is going to look like if quantum computing is everywhere and accessible to everyone?

6:40How's it going to change?

6:41John Martinis:So there's kind of two things involved in this. First of all, we have to build better hardware. and then we have to be, you know, think about algorithms, be smarter with the algorithms and the like. And there's just kind of a gap now. And maybe some people think there's not much of a gap and other people think there's a big gap, but we need to close the gap. And that's building better hardware, which is what I'm doing in my company. We're trying to do that as well as many other people. And then people have to be more clever. And what's interesting as you build better hardware, where you can test out the algorithms better, and then you can maybe discover exactly what's, you know, what you need to get it to work right.

7:24John Martinis:So it's a very interesting time where, you know, everyone's really trying to push these things together and get it to work properly. Yeah, it feels like it's a really fast growing market. According to Quantum Insider report, it's going to generate$1 trillion in economic value in the next 10 years. That's an optimistic scenario that we find useful things to do. It's quite possible that will happen. And certainly I like those kind of forecasts because when we try to raise money. But our idea is that what we're really trying to do in our company is make a general purpose error corrected quantum computer.

8:02John Martinis:and not that hundreds of physical qubits, what are people now, but you may need a million physical qubits operating the way where the errors go down and it works properly, where I think the real value will be unlocked. And, you know, the long-term value. Certainly, you know, if people do this in the next few years, you'll get good value. But those kind of numbers you're talking about, our thesis is you're going to build this big computer and make it very well. So he's betting on hardware the way Jensen Huang bet on GPUs before anyone knew what they were for. Now, that's the question that has been on my mind since I heard about quantum computing.

8:49Yeah. What do you think for all the entrepreneurs who are watching who want to start building something in this field? What are the most exciting markets? when it comes to quantum computing? Is it building hardware or is it like applying the algorithms?

9:02John Martinis:Well, there's a lot of effort into algorithms because building software and algorithms is a relatively low cost. You don't have to buy it. So our company is doing the exact wrong thing, which is investing in building hardware really well. Now, the nice thing is, is that once you do that, you can be and you're successful, you can be an extremely successful company. And I like to think about NVIDIA, although they're partnering with TSMC, but their knowledge of designing the computers and putting together the systems have made them extremely valuable company. And when our view on hardware is that, you know, it's possible for us to do that, do that too.

9:53John Martinis:So we're taking the hard approach and focusing on the hardware. And then our particular thesis is that if you look at superconducting qubits right now and where they are, I mean, I helped invent all the things to get there. And I think it's great. But it's still kind of a little bit, I would say, academic or maybe even artisanal fabrication. and that we're trying to use much more established semiconductor tools and fabrication process and the like in order to scale up and make the qubits better. Yeah. And when it comes to markets, what do you think are the markets that are going to be transformed the most?

10:35We talked about health care, finance, any other markets?

10:39John Martinis:It's all of the above. And you hear people working on that. But I like that we have very definite ideas on how to build it. So let me, I can explain this for maybe some of the Silicon Valley types. I really love Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. Okay. And that kind of, in some sense, explained my career. So I am very much a definite optimist. I want to know what to build. I want to know what to build to make it useful. And that's what that paper was all about. Now, there's a lot of people in this field who are indefinite optimists. In fact, most people in the United States are. And they have all the ideas like you're talking about.

11:25John Martinis:And I think that's great. I'm glad people are pushing that. My particular way my mind works and what's always been successful is to really focus in on something definite you have to do. However, I'm very well aware you're in a startup company. You'll probably have to pivot and think about different things. And we'd be happy to do that once those ideas come to fruition. But the one thing I know for sure is we have to make better qubits and we have to make it scale. We need the hardware. We need the hardware. OK, so that's what we're doing no matter what happens. Yeah, I think. So this question has been bothering me for a while.

12:02I think you're the right person to ask. Is quantum computing going to break cryptocurrencies?

12:09John Martinis:So my the CEO of my company is an expert here, and I'm going to hopefully represent it well enough. Um, my understanding is if you have some of the older cryptic currency that was encoded in a way that could be broken. But, um, some of the, if the newer versions, it's, um, it's a little bit stiffer encryption. Is that Bitcoin the oldest? I think this is Bitcoin as I recall. So that one's. And then you can take your old Bitcoin and, um, you know, pull it out and then re-encrypt it to make it, make it better. So you can make it safe. But there's a lot of Bitcoin that's kind of unclaimed, that's old, and it's a lot of money.

12:58Oh, interesting. So once quantum computing breaks into that.

13:02John Martinis:So that is a market for a quantum computer. Business idea. Well, so we're aware of that, okay? And that's fine. Now, what my CEO is doing, which I think is very responsible, is talking to the U.S. Treasury about this. Because the U.S. Treasury is going to be concerned that if other companies or criminal organizations get a hold of that money, it's a lot of money. Yeah, it is. That's a real issue. And you probably want to set up laws in some system in order to do that. Yeah, because it's still very unregulated. There's so much crypto ledgers. Yeah, and that's the problem is you have something very unregulated, which people really like.

13:51John Martinis:But in some sense, that's the Achilles' heel. Yeah. That because it's unregulated, some technology can overcome it. And so there may need to be some thought on how to do it. Now, I'm not an expert here. But no, it's good to hear your perspective. But I think I'm getting this kind of directionally correct. I talk to the people building what's next before it makes headlines. If that's useful to you, do not forget to subscribe to this channel. What is the timeline that you think? So what I like to say is it's possible in five to 10 years to build this a big enough quantum computer to do that. And partly I just say that that's kind of an optimistic scenario.

14:36John Martinis:And partly I say that is to warn people that, you know, this may be coming and you want to protect, you know, every not just Bitcoin, but, you know, the whole Internet needs to switch over in this kind of time period. Yeah. Now, what's interesting and just I was at a at a meeting where the IBM kind of quoted similar numbers. This is all very reasonable. It's funny that at Google, the CEO is saying three to five years. Oh, he's trying to push things. Well, I think he's pushing because if you're a CEO and you're making a prediction, you want to have a lower number because you don't want to be caught without that.

15:20John Martinis:But, for example, Google already has quantum resistant protocols on at least some of their traffic. I don't know the details, but, you know, these big companies already know about it and are protecting their data or will be protecting their data. Yeah. But there's things like crypto that, you know, that's beyond that and other kinds of private systems that you might have to worry about. That was very interesting. So basically we're working on quantum computing, but then we also need to work on the algorithms that protect existing systems. Yeah. And what happened is actually the idea that you can break it, break it with this.

15:57John Martinis:It was invented in the 1990s. People understood that. Well, Peter Shore. And then, you know, in the early, early 1990s. And then the government, you know, really has understood this for a long time. And I'm going to say about 10, maybe 12 years ago, the government got very serious about this. and they saw that, yeah, okay, the technology maybe, you know, could make this happen. And for example, at NIST, they have a big program that they're looking at what they called quantum safe cryptography, other ways to encode it. And that's been 10 years. They have nice algorithms. People, you know, you can download essentially the algorithm and code and people are building systems to do this.

16:48John Martinis:So people have been responding to this. Well, you can buy solutions here. And, you know, so I think we're in pretty good state. I think people are still, you know, investigate. You know, part of the thing about the crypto security is people have to try to break it for a long time to make sure that it's really safe. I mean, people don't know that RSA is unbreakable. RSA? For sure. But they know from practice that, you know, and the way that everything's operating that they don't think anyone has broken it. So it needs time to do this. You know, you're observing extremely rare events and you're building something that is completely new.

17:33Has that changed how you think about luck, black swan moments? Because you're observing them basically in your work.

17:40John Martinis:Um, what's kind of strange in my career is, um, I've been developing a series of experiments, uh, and, um, uh, how I've gone from, you know, one project to the other. And what's kind of funny in my career is I do a project and then somehow it doesn't work out in some way. And then I'm, you know, stuck wondering, well, I have to do something else. And and then I figure out what else to do. That's really interesting. So changing all the different topics and projects has always come through some strange event, often kind of a negative event. And just to give you an example, I went to Google. They paid me well.

18:37John Martinis:We did this quantum supremacy experiment. But then at some point after the quantum supremacy, they wanted to change the way they managed the group. And essentially, I was not Googly enough to stay at Google and I had to leave, which was, you know, kind of difficult to essentially leave a project you started way back in graduate school. However, by leaving Google, I was then free to think very creatively and free to think, well, we're building in a certain way. And how do I really want to build this to make it scalable and better and whatever? And by starting my own company and thinking freely and, you know, starting it with a co-founders, we were able to come with a bunch of ideas how to make it better.

19:30John Martinis:And it could be that although that was a very, let's say, traumatic thing, I'm sure other people have gone through this, that may be the best thing for me and the field that I was able to do something new out of it. Absolutely. So, you know, that's one thing. And this has happened to me over and over again. And I kind of have to accept that, you know, that's sometimes these setbacks in life are actually very good for you. So the good thing is this year, I just kind of I knew it was coming up, but I totally forgot about it. So when the phone call came, it was a complete surprise. Is it like in the middle of the night?

20:07Middle of the night. Well, and it was my wife was awake and she saw she heard the phone ringing, but she thought she'd catch in the morning. And then she was just going to sleep and she looked at her email and there was all these congratulations. But that was like, you know, two thirty in the morning. Yeah. And she knows I need my sleep. So she didn't tell me until about six o 'clock. That, you know, because I needed my sleep. and also there were reporters who were coming to that house and they wanted to wake me up in bed k-pop demon hunters haja boys breakfast meal and huntrix meal have just dropped at mcdonald's they're calling this a battle for the fans what do you say to that roomie it's not a battle so glad the saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day it is an honor to share.

21:01No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. I participate in McDonald's while supplies last. And she pushed them away like let him get his sleep. She said, no way are we gonna do that. But I do remember her like, you know, sitting in the bed and, you know, waking me up gently and saying, hey, there's some reporters and and you know i kind of i do it's october so i i just opened my computer and i saw you know my picture there with the with john and michelle so that was a very like it's just you can't believe that it's happening it's like a fairy tale it's a fairy tale and what i would say is i think the most interesting part is you get to go to things like this uh and and see have these very amazing experiences.

21:59Here's what I actually walked away with. JP Morgan and Google aren't waiting for quantum to be ready. They are already deploying it. The race is happening whether your industry knows it or not. The encryption protecting everything you do online, your bank, your company data, your messages, was built before quantum computers existed. John's timeline, five to ten years. So that's not a distant problem. If you work in tech, finance, or cybersecurity, this is conversation I think we should be having right now. In my newsletter this week, I mapped out which industries are most exposed right now and what people in those fields are actually doing about it and how can you start adjusting your career for what's to come.

22:40My newsletter is called Future Proof, the link is in the description. Quantum is 5 to 10 years out. AI is right now. I talked to a Stanford professor about exactly what to do in the next 30 days. That video is right here on the screen. It is very practical. It's going to make you excited about AI and excited about introducing it into your workflows. See you in that episode. And thank you for watching this after the very end. Bye.