Welcome back to Impact Quantum, the podcast where

quantum computing isn't just theoretical, it's commercial,

calibrated and occasionally trapped by lasers.

In this episode, Frank Lavine welcomes back repeat guest,

Yuval Boger, now chief Commercial Officer at

Chewira Computing. Since his last visit,

Yuval's gone from marketing lead to commercial char just in time to

help helm a $230 million funding

round, ship cutting edge quantum computers to Japan

and push neutral atom technology to the bleeding edge of quantum

innovation. Yuval walks us through Chuira's unique approach.

Think single atoms wrangled by lasers, shuttled

around like qubit square dancers and all operated at room

temperature. No cryogenic chandeliers here, thank you

very much. Together, they explore everything from the global

quantum arms race to practical advice for non

physicists eager to join the Quantum revolution.

No PhD required, just curiosity, a decent WiFi

connection and possibly a backup hair dryer.

So whether you're a cto, a curious coder, or

someone wondering if quantum can help with your FedEx logistics or your

anticorrosion coatings, this episode is your entangled

invitation to the future of computing.

Hello and welcome back to Impact Quantum, the podcast where we explore

the emerging marketplace and field that is quantum

computing. With me, we have, I think, our. Not our first repeat

guest ever, but our first repeat guest since

season two. Very welcome,

big warm welcome to Yuval Boger, who

is back and bigger than ever. Right? You've

now the. You're the Chief Commercial Officer at Quera

Computing. And what's going on? Anything new since we last

spoke? Well, it has been a while. Thank you for

inviting me back. Always a pleasure to be here. This

year we had a number of super exciting things

happening. In no particular order,

we raised a bunch of money. We raised $230

million, led by Google and

Softbank and of course with participation of our existing

investors. And that allows us to dramatically expand the

team with fantastic scientists,

engineers, technicians, business people and so on,

all towards the purpose of accelerating our progress towards quantum

computers that are truly useful right now. Quantum

computers are not truly useful. They're useful as tools to

learn and to experiment and to prepare for larger

scale computers. But that's what we're working on. So that's one exciting

thing that happened. The other thing, as you

know, Quera builds quantum computers using neutral atom technology.

Neutral atom technology means that individual qubits, these

quantum bits, are individual atoms. I

can explain how that works if you want, later. We've

had one of our systems on the cloud on AWS

since November of 22. So coming up to the three year

anniversary and we're glad that it's still up and running and

usage actually continues to grow. But an exciting thing that happened

this year is that we shipped a next generation system to one of

our customers in Japan.

In Japan there is the equivalent of NIST in the us

the National Institute for Science and

Technology and they purchased one of our Gemini GIG based quantum

computers. It's installed right next to super bad, super

big Nvidia classical supercomputer. So they're really

interested in exploring both state of the art

quantum computers from Quera as well as what you could do

with integrating classical and quantum computing. So that

was another big thing that happened. And of course we continue to have some

fantastic scientific results both for Quera as well

as from our collaborators at Harvard and mit. And so we

truly think we are at the leading edge of quantum computing.

Very cool. Yeah. Because I think when we last spoke you were the chief

Marketing officer and now you're the chief Commercial officer,

which I think also shows the evolution of the industry in general.

Right. So fun

fact, my wife actually works at nist, not doing quantum computing, but

so I'm one of the few people and I know what you're referring to when

you say it, but

so you've had enormous success. Congratulations.

So I think you can probably speak to

the growth that the quantum industry is feeling and kind of the

sorts of skill sets that are needed. You mentioned, you know, having to hire more

business line folks and things like that. What, what has been the

top challenge in terms of receiving, of growing

like that? Well, there are

many different challenges and hopefully we're tackling them one by one. Of

course it's finding the right people with the right skill set and with

the right mentality on how to best work

in a dynamic company that's so science heavy.

There are new challenges that we haven't experienced before. And

okay, we're shipping a system to Japan, it needs to be installed, it needs to

be serviced. Not going to do that remotely. It's not a, you

know, it's not that Amazon prime shows up with a quantum computer on your door

and you self assemble it. So there are

interesting challenges on how to sort of

have this customer success team that makes sure that that's the

case. We continue to add users of different

varieties worldwide. How do we support them, how do we

give them the tools to succeed? How do we turn

new scientific breakthroughs that come from Quera, Harvard and

MIT into working products? So lots and lots

of exciting Challenges. And that's what makes it fun

to work with Quera. Yeah, I mean, that would be cool. I guess you need

a certain type of personality. It's okay if you really are doing

uncharted stuff, right. Quantum computers have been around in one form, the other for a

while. But the whole notion of, you know, someone's gonna have to rack them

and stack them, right. And it sounds like you had that experience in Japan,

which is probably also adds an extra level of complexity, right? You're not

just doing it down the street, you're doing it on the other

side of the world with different culture, different, you know.

And so what was the one

takeaway you learned from kind of like your first or

deployment like that? That it's a lot of

stuff. I mean, if you looked at the number of trucks and

pallets and customs forms and

all these things that, you know, they don't happen when you write software,

you know, software. Software is easy relative to

schlepping around so much equipment around the world. But

you're absolutely right. The industry is growing and customer

needs are evolving. And sometimes

with all the day to day excitement, it's useful to

stop and sort of look back on where we are and where things are going.

And we think that 10 years

ago, maybe 8, 10, 12 people

weren't actually sure that quantum computers could be built at all.

I mean, they saw, okay, we understand what,

you know, Feynman and Heisenberg and Dirac and others are saying

about quantum mechanics, but can you turn that into a product?

And of course, since then, Quera and dozens of other companies have

built quantum computers. So that question has been answered. Yes, you can build

a quantum computer. The next challenge was can

you detect and correct errors in quantum

computers? These qubits, these quantum bits are

fragile. They're susceptible to different things depending

on what type of qubit you're using. They may be

susceptible to vibrations or cosmic rays or

changes in temperature or numerous other

things. And what that does is that once in

a while you get an incorrect calculation.

And the state of the art quantum computers today maybe

get that incorrect calculation. One in a thousand.

So 999 times are good and one time is

incorrect. That doesn't sound like a lot, but if you're trying

to make a really sophisticated calculation of a useful business

problem, maybe you need a million operations. If one in a

thousand operation is faulty, then there's absolutely no chance you're going to get

to a millionth operation with correct results. Therefore,

one needs to be able to detect errors and then correct them. It's

almost like a parody bit in memory, say, okay, something's going on here,

I need to fix it. And that was an open question. And then In

December of 23, Harvard published really

landmark publication together with Quera and MIT

and University of Maryland and NIST again,

that demonstrated experimentally that you could detect and correct errors. And since

then, other companies, Google, for instance, have also shown

error correction. And so that's been settled,

maybe better ways or worse ways to do it. But the question, could you do

it at all? Has been settled. Now we're in this third and

exciting phase of can you make quantum computers large enough,

with enough qubits, with enough

longevity to

truly solve useful business problems? And so the,

the goalposts are changing, you know, from, can you build one? Can you

detect an error? Can you build truly useful ones? And

therefore, our requirements in terms of capital, in terms of people, in terms of

partners, are also evolving. Interesting.

So who are the drivers of purchasing quantum

computers for commercial enterprises? Right. Is it

the C level? Is it people who lead up divisions?

Right. So if I have, say I'm a large multinational and, you

know, is it the, like corporate IT

or is it divisional it? Like, who is it?

Let me ask you a question first, and it'll help me explain. Does

vodka taste good generally? No.

Right. So why do people drink vodka? Right. I don't think because

of the taste, but maybe they like how it makes them feel

ultimately once it's in their bloodstream. Okay, that's

fair. Similarly, so this is the

first quantum computers in vodka podcast. Right. So similarly,

I don't think that people buy quantum computers for Quantum.

They buy Quantum. They look at Quantum not as the destination, but

rather as the vehicle to get there.

Not as the, not as the hole in the wall that

they need, but rather in the tool that creates that. That

hole. And so we see three types of organizations that

are interested in Quantum. The first one who are

spending a good amount worldwide is governments,

both national governments and also state governments

or regional governments. They see Quantum as an engine

for economic prosperity. They say maybe they've

missed out on 5G or AI, or autonomous

driving or, or the Internet in general. And they say, we're not going to do

that in Quantum. We're going to have Quantum here, and that's going to create jobs

and it's going to attract capital and researchers and so on. So

they're willing to invest in quantum computers to facilitate that

economic prosperity. The second group of people

is high performance computing centers. High performance computing centers. Are those

that have purchased classical supercomputers. And, and

these supercomputers today are used for AI, or they're used for

weather modeling and prediction, or they're used for drug discovery

or optimization problems and so on. And increasingly the

users of these HPC centers are running into problems

that are beyond the capabilities of classical computers.

The Department of Energy buys a supercomputer every couple of

years and it's much larger than the previous one, but still it hits

its limits. So high performance computing

centers are exploring whether quantum computers can help

their users break some of these barriers, solve problems that were

not solvable classically. And the third

type of organizations are commercial

organizations, not HPC centers. But it could be

pharmaceutical companies or energy companies or automotive companies

that basically say

could quantum computing deliver a competitive advantage

in a couple years? If I'm four, then I'm able to design a

new better battery using quantum computers. That would be really huge

if I'm FedEx and I'm able to use a quantum computer

to optimize my route so that my drivers can

deliver the same amount of packages either quicker, but

let's say with 10% fewer energy. Wow, that's going to impact

the bottom line. If I'm Merck and I can use a quantum computer to

explore new compounds quicker and get a vaccine to market faster,

then that's exciting to them. So in summary,

governments, high performance computing centers and

enterprises are all looking at quantum as the vehicle

to get them to a better destination. Interesting,

interesting. So, but who actually

cuts the check to like who, who is

the actual customer like in there is it sounds to me,

if I had a guess, it's probably.

Business unit it the

computer that we sold to Japan for instance, we published

the sale price, it was about just over $40 million

depending on the exchange rate and so on. But $40 million,

this is not a low level admin signing off a $40

million check, not to mention the surrounding

infrastructure. So yeah, that certainly goes high up.

It could be a cio, it could be a cto, it could be the.

If it's an HPC center, that's what they do.

Keep in mind that to use quantum computers, not everyone needs to buy

one. They could use one much less

expensively on the cloud. So if all they want is to

dabble a little bit, to experiment, a company

could do a really nice job by hiring three people,

by partnering with a company like Quera to co develop

algorithms or applications and then use cloudtime on a

Quera machine or some other machines to do that,

and these are much lower cost and

require much lower initial investment and therefore more

people could sign off on such a purchase. Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

That makes a lot of sense. I also, I think you're right. I think for

the most part most organizations are going to first do this in the

cloud and then I would imagine eventually the cost of that would go down

from 40 million to closer to, closer to 10 or 4.

Right. At some point for on premises,

sure. I mean, I don't know when, but. Right.

I mean, you look, you look at quantum, you look

at classical supercomputers, the cost keeps going higher and higher.

Now, of course, that you could buy a computer with the same capabilities

that were five years ago for much lower cost than you paid five years ago.

I mean, even iPhone prices are going up. You know, it's every,

every new model is more expensive than the previous one. Right. That's

true. But I guess I wonder. There's probably a lot of factors

at play, but. Yeah, but I mean, if you think of it in terms of

compute unit divided by cost, it is going

down. It's just. Yeah. One, one interesting

thing when people do the ROI or the cost calculations is

actually the energy consumption. You look at high performance

computing centers and supercomputers. Classical supercomputers

take megawatts of energy. That's why you see companies like

Microsoft and others saying, oh, we're going to have our little nuclear

reactor right next to the HPC center. Or there's talk

about restarting Three Mile island to generate enough

electricity. Our computer today

consumes about 10 kilowatts.

So that's three or four orders of

magnitude less than a classical supercomputer, maybe even more.

When I go to, when I present

at HPC conferences and I say 10 kilowatts, people say, well, what's

this K letter? We've never heard about it. We just know megawatts. And I sort

of learned to say, oh, it takes 0.01 megawatts.

That's how they get it. And if an HPC

center spends millions and millions of dollars on electricity,

then a quantum computer could almost pay for itself just with the

electricity saving if it can take some workload

off a classical supercomputer. That is an interesting

angle I had not considered before because I often

wondered what are the power requirements for a quantum computer?

And to put it in perspective, I think non

high performance compute people would think is that

you said 10 kilowatts. Yeah, sounds like that. I had a backup

generator for my house which powered like 90% of my house. It was 17,

17 kilowatts. Right. So like you're talking about,

you know, less than what a, what a big house, what a

household would use. Yeah. I mean 10 kilowatts is, I don't

know, four hair dryers. Yeah. Five hair dryers. Yeah. If

you could have a hair dryer operating in five rooms. Right. And

you're good. So it's probably not as much. No, I mean obviously

not nearly as much as that. And what's interesting, two things. One, I live in

the space between where all the data

centers are, which is in Ashburn, Virginia and between

Three Mile Island. And one of the big political fights now is they

want to put in transmission lines that basically will go straight from

there down down to Virginia. And it's a

big fight because they're going to rip up a lot of farmland and things like

that. It's interesting. Either that or put a

power plant there, so. Or put a power plant there. Well, you know, there's a

lot of problems with building a new. It's cheaper actually

to restart an old nuclear power plant, even one with a storied

history, which is a little scary. But I looked at the major wind

patterns and I'll be okay.

And by the way, these wind patterns are probably analyzed by a supercomputer today,

right? Yeah, that's funny and I certainly hope they're accurate.

But you also mentioned something I think very, very profound is that a lot of

regional governments, state level, local

realize that they missed out on the Internet, they missed out on AI

and they see what can they get their foot into

now. And Maryland, I live in Maryland and not that far from

the University of Maryland. And you know, Maryland's been pretty aggressive

as things go in investing in quantum. As

has a number of municipalities in Canada where my co host

Candice lives, she lives in Montreal. And so it's interesting to see how

a lot of politicians at the

not a sub national level and national level

see the writing on the wall like this. This is going to be a major

shift and I think to that end, like there's no real,

it's not like Swiss software and

chip manufacturing. There's clearly a center of gravity, right. Silicon

Valley, obviously there are

startup hotspots around the world, but when you think of

chip manufacturing, it's basically Taipei, Shenzhen and

kind of Silicon Valley. But you think of software, big tech. Right. It's

basically Seattle and

the Bay Area. Right. So it's interesting to see like a lot

of players are playing the Game now. And they're doing economic development,

which I think is, I think it just shows that even politicians have

realized about the importance of technology research and development.

And it's happening both at the state level. You mentioned Maryland. There's certainly a

lot of investment in Colorado and Illinois, New Mexico,

Massachusetts, where Quera is. And we'd like to think of

ourselves, excuse the pun, as the quantum center of mass.

But it's also happening on the federal level. Darpa, for instance, has

started a really exciting program called qbi, Quantum Benchmarking

Initiative, where they selected, they took

a lot of applications, they selected about 20 companies.

Quera, of course, is one of them for phase one, and

then could be phase two and phase three. And phase three could be up to

$300 million per company. So it's

a huge deal and a really impressive commitment

from the federal government to say Quantum is

strategic, it has economic implications, it has

national security implications. We want to make sure that the

US is the leader there. And of course, you know,

France is investing billions in quantum computing, right? We did.

We opened an office in the uk, part of the UK national Quantum program

that's also investing very handsomely.

Japan, Germany. So we see these billion dollar

investments all over the world

and they're excited about Quantum. And I think for

good reason. I think the recent G7 summit

in Canada, Quantum was a line item on the agenda, which I thought

was interesting. Yeah, I think Canada is going to be renamed Quanada. You know,

Fix. Candace will love that. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. Candace as well, right? Should be Candace with a Q.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, I should tell her that should be her new brand.

So the other thing you mentioned is the type of technology

that you use. So one of the things that's fascinated

me is, you know, with electronics, right. It's in the name, right?

Whatever you're doing, whether you're playing, you know, Halo,

working in a spreadsheet, doing, using

ChatGPT, right. You are basically you

have little electrons in a little maze.

Oversimplifying. And it's basically you're taking. Using

the power of electricity to be on or off, right? That's basically

it. But it's all more or less silicon

substrate. It's all happening. So what's fascinating about quantum computing

is that there's no, there's more than one way to do it, right? There's

photonics, there's ion traps, there's

topological, there's. There's a bunch of ways. What is the

way that you use. Called the single atom,

it's called neutral Atom. So you're right, there are many, many ways. And by the

way, when you look at storage, classical storage,

you have electricity, you have magnetism. You know, you used to have these

ring memories where you have an array with rings

that sort of change orientation. You've got the DVDs,

right, that store it kind of optically. You've got many different ways to do storage.

And similarly, you have many different ways to do quantum computing.

We use a method, a modality called neutral atoms.

And in neutral atoms, a qubit is a single

atom. And one of the beautiful things about having a

single atom as a qubit is that you could take a billion

atoms and they would be perfectly identical. There is no

manufacturing variation from atom to atom. Whereas if you are

actually manufacturing qubits in silicon or

something else, you get into manufacturing variations,

which makes life much more difficult to control and calibrate and

control errors. If you've seen

movies where there's a bank safe and the bank safe has

these lasers coming down from the ceiling, and the villain is

trying, or the hero is trying to evade them,

think about that. For our computer, what we

have is we take these individual atoms and. And we

trap them in tiny laser beams, almost like the laser beams

that come from the ceiling in a bank. Of course, in a much, much smaller

scale, the atoms, for various reasons,

like to find themselves in the center of a beam. So they sort of,

if you have a grid of beams coming in from

top, you're going to capture, with a little bit of work, you're going to

capture an atom in every single beam. So far, so good.

Now, these atoms, if they are far away from each other,

they're indifferent. If they're close together and you

shine a different laser on them from a different direction or a

different type of laser, then they can interact, they can

entangle, they can interact. That's how you do the quantum

calculation. Now, because the atoms like to

be in the center of the beam, when you move the beam,

the atoms move with it. Imagine that I have

many atoms each trapped in a beam. I'm simplifying it a little bit.

But if you want to have two atoms interact, you just

move their beams over, get them to do something, and then you could do something

else with them. That's the

essence of how our computer works. When we shine a

laser on these atoms, they. Their energy state changes.

One of the electrons goes to higher energy level, and

that's how the 1 state or the 0 state is encoded.

And where is that electron?

Another thing that's really Cool about the way we do things is

that when you think about a classical computer, it's got a memory,

lots and lots of memory, and then it has a cpu and calculations happen by

the CPU fetching data from memory, putting it into

registers, doing something, and then putting it back in memory.

Similarly, our computers also have at

least two regions. One region that is we call a storage

region, where these qubits can live for a really long time.

And then we move them, we shuttle them to an area where

we can operate on them and then do something, and we can then take them

back. So we have these really cool movies on YouTube

and on our website showing these atoms. Some people call them atom square

dancing, where you see individual atoms move around.

Now, why is that good? We spoke about

atoms being perfectly identical, so no manufacturing defects. That's

great. The other thing is that the system

operates at room temperature. It does not need these

cryogenic cooling systems. Really?

Absolutely. Really. And so, you know, when you Google quantum

computer, the image that often comes up is this golden chandelier. Now, we

may have a golden chandelier just for show. We thought

we'd have golden chandelier earrings for those that like them. But we don't need it

in our system. Interesting. And the reason that's important

is that these cryogenic coolers take enormous

amount of energy, but they introduce new requirements into

the data center for gas refills and other complexities

that simply don't exist with our system.

The next thing that makes our system unique is that ability to

move qubits around to shuttle qubits. And here's why it's

important. Imagine that you are at a cocktail party,

and if you're like me, you're standing by the punch bowl or the bar,

and. But then you see someone on the other side of

the room and you want to talk to that person. If you're a neutral atom

qubit, you just walk over and

talk, interact with that person. If you're a qubit made

of superconducting or other things that are

etched in silicon or fixed in place, you can't

directly talk to that other qubit. You have to talk to the

person or the qubit next to you, and that qubit has to relay the message

to the qubit next to them. And. And you have these multiple hops.

And like in the game of telephone or telegraph, when you have

these multiple hops, the message could get corrupted.

And so it's easier to do it our way in

terms of controlling the errors. The other thing, and I

could go on and on. But the last thing I'll mention right now is the

number of control signals. When you have a superconducting qubit,

I usually have two or three wires going to control that qubit.

And that may sound okay, but if you want to go to a computer that

has 100,000 qubits, you're going to need 200,000 wires.

That's a lot of wires to cool and route and control the noise.

Imagine if you were opening your TV and found

a wire going into every pixel. That would be a really big and expensive

and heavy television set. In our case, that's

not the case. When we can control many, many qubits with

very few lasers and very few control signals. The

scalability, the practical realities of building a larger

computer are much easier with neutral atoms. That's

one of the reasons we are so excited about it. Actually, just today

there was a paper, a really nice article

in Science magazine. It's called

Atomic Explosion, and I'm reading it. That's why I'm looking to

decide. After faltering early on, quantum

computers fashioned out of individual atoms retake the

lead. So that's. These are some of the reasons that many

experts, including the author of the Science paper,

believe that neutral atoms are really the leading modality, the leading way

to build truly useful quantum computers. Yeah, I would imagine

that the cooling tanks and all of that represents

a major barrier towards just widespread

adoption of this. Right. Data centers, as they

are already complicated animals. I can, I

can see that that's always been a point

of concern, I guess, but the fact that you've got this

done at room temperature, I mean, any other special requirements

like. Or is it just,

you know. Well, every, every qubit has its sensitivities. Right. So

for instance, we have an optical. This is an optical

setup. Right. So you've got lenses and mirrors and lasers,

and they're all held in place. So what we

ask in high performance computing center where a system is deployed

is for temperature. Stability doesn't really matter what the temperature

is as long as it's stable, say within plus or

minus a degree. And the reason is actually

mechanical. If the temperature changes dramatically, then

the mechanical parts could expand or contract

or move around and that might sort of force the system out

of calibration. So we like stability and

temperature. And if we had our choice, we'd also prefer

to be on the ground floor, say, as opposed to the 10th floor.

10th floor has more sort of natural shaking and

vibration in high buildings. Yeah. How does that work

with the earthquakes? I Imagine it doesn't, probably

doesn't break it, but it would have to be shut down and like recalibrated.

You know, I think that if there was a major earthquake, the quantum computer would

probably be the least of your problems. That's true, that's true. I'm thinking, well, I

mean Japan. I'm thinking of the, the Fukushima, not the,

the Fukushima earthquake. Right. Like obviously, yeah, I guess the tsunami and things like

that would be bigger. Problems than we have

because I briefly mentioned that we have a system running in

Boston since 2022 and we've

developed expertise in how to keep it up and running. When we started

that service, it was available for users for only 10 hours

a week and now it's available for about

130 hours a week. So almost the entire week 24, 7

is available. And we've developed the expertise and hired the right people and

developed the right tools and to keep it up and running in peak

performance. Interesting,

interesting. So for those that are

maybe, and you've experienced this, so you've had to

recruit for people for, as part of your growth, what would you recommend?

Like you know, non quantum people,

what would you recommend them to do? Right.

So if somebody's a marketer or they want to be a sales rep or they

want to be a customer success engineer,

what would you recommend for them to study today so they can

be prepared for your eventual growth and the growth

of this whole ecosystem? What would be your advice?

If this was cybersecurity, companies would say,

oh yeah, I need someone with 15 years of experience inside it. Well,

you're going to be hard pressed to find anyone with so many years of

experience in quantum. It's a new area and there are so many people who

are getting into it. But you don't just have to be a

quantum physicist. You know, as you mentioned,

we have customer success people. Well, you need, you need to

have a decent understanding of science, but you don't need a PhD from

Harvard. You just need to want to work with customers, maybe be good

with your hands as things happen. We have

software developers that touch a Mac, a MacBook, just

like any other software developers. Except their target is

not a microprocessor or an fpga, but rather a quantum

computer. We've got double E's electronic

engineers, because these systems have high speed, fine

grained, multichannel electronic control

that again is specific to quantum computing and

touches a quantum computer. But you don't have to understand physics to do

that. We have people who do optical assembly who

are Mechanical designers, because these systems need to be designed, they need to

look good, they need to be stable, they need to be easy to

calibrate. So just like an MRI

machine or a large format printer or

something like that, you find that you have many, many different disciplines

that can contribute in a very meaningful way to the success of the

company. Interesting.

So it sounds like a very encouraging message. Right. You don't need to be

a physicist. You have to have appreciation for the science, but you don't have to

completely understand it. Right. And I'm sure You already have

PhD physicist type people from Harvard on your payroll,

so you can always bring them into a meeting

and that sort of thing. We've got plenty of those.

But that's part of the maturing process of the industry and the

company. Right. I only have a master's in

physics, a graduate degree in physics, and

when I joined Quera about three years ago, they barely let

me in the door. Right. You don't have a PhD and it's not from

Harvard. But since then we've relaxed our

requirements and I'm glad I joined and I

hope the company is glad that they accepted me.

Anyway. I like how you said

only a master's in physics.

So where do you think is next for the quantum industry?

What do you think is Next? I think

VCs politicians are finally. I wouldn't say

finally, but over the last year or two they've kind of caught on. And this

is real, this is going to happen.

What do you think is next? Like, what do you think is going to be

the big bang moment that makes everybody wake, sit up and take

notice? That's a great question. And

imagine if 10 years ago you asked the same question about AI. Oh, AI

has been worked on since the 60s. When is something going to

happen? So we sometimes say ChatGPT was an

overnight success, 30 years in the making. Right? Right. I think

that ChatGPT moment for Quantum is going to come in

the next couple of years, but it's probably not going to

be universal. So it's not going to be, oh, this quantum computer can solve

any problem in any field that you care about. We

think, and others agree, that one very promising area is

chemistry and drug discovery. The ability to simulate molecules

or vaccines or anti corrosion or new batteries and

so on. And it may be that in two or three years,

companies will be able to do truly useful work on a

quantum computer in these areas. So imagine if

we spoke about Ford, but it could be Toyota, or imagine if dupont

came up with a new anti Corrosion coating that was developed on

a quantum computer and that became a big hit. Or

Merck, that has been doing some work with us, comes up with

a new drug that was brought much faster into

the market because it was simulated initially on a quantum

computer that would create a minor virtual

earthquake in the industry, because now, omg,

they have this capability. They can do things faster, better, cheaper,

and now everyone's going to rush to do it. And

so, aside from developing the hardware, which we and other companies

are working on, we have a bunch of partners that are working

on writing the applications. What do I need to know to use a

quantum computer? If I'm a chemist, if I have an

optimization problem I need to solve, how do

I do it? How low do I need to go in terms of understanding

quantum physics to be useful? And so

we think that within this decade,

there will be truly useful applications

that either generate lots of money for businesses or

save a lot of money for businesses.

Interesting. That's a, That's a good answer. And I think it's.

I think it's interesting because you're right. Ten years ago,

people, when I made the switch into AI, like 10,

11 years ago now, people thought I was crazy,

right? Like, it was called data science back then, right? And I remember people

like, so you're studying statistics, why? Right?

And it seemed crazy. That's why

when I first heard of quantum computing, actually, I thought, this seems

crazy. And I'm like, wait a minute, I've seen this kind of

crazy before. And, you know, that was like

2019. And, you know, while

it. It's not quite as

overnight of a success as CHAT GPT, I think you're right. There is going to

be a CHAT GPT moment for quantum computers.

It's probably going to be in chemistry, pharmaceutical space. But,

you know, again, like, it's going to happen. The question is when?

And I think the. Oh, go ahead. You're absolutely right.

The other analogy I think is when you say, well, what

made ChatGPT or what made AI

explode all of a sudden? And of course, there was some work

in algorithms. You know, obviously attention is all you need

that paper. But fundamentally it was just computing capacity. The

algorithms, you know, neural networks have all been

understood and known for many years, but just all of a sudden there were computers

that were powerful enough to run large enough networks,

right? This may be where we are in quantum, where we have some really interesting

algorithms, but now we say the computers are

starting to get big enough to be able to run

sufficiently long calculations. And that's why all of a

sudden, the light would go on. And

we spoke earlier about laser beams coming from the

ceiling and trapping atoms, and atoms being microns

apart. It's science fiction

until it isn't. And when we have visitors at

Quera, they say, I can't believe this is a single atom that you're controlling

and shooting lasers in and you're making it move. It will.

And then they see it and say, oh, yeah, I believe you.

This is now real. The stuff of science fiction 10

years ago is getting shipped to customers these days.

Right. Interesting.

That's an interesting point. I like that, because we're living

increasingly in a time when science

fiction is quickly becoming science fact, whether it's AI, whether it's intelligent

systems, whether it's any number of

things. And I do think, though, that we are going to

hit a wall of compute with conventional computers,

whether it's the actual size of them, but definitely the

power consumption is becoming a major and major point.

Right. We're restarting old nuclear reactors. Right. We're running power

lines through states. Right. I

also understand that a lot of data centers. Data centers tend to have a pretty

heavy water usage. Right. So there's so that kind of concern. Right. So, you

know, I think that quantum, if it really,

you know, you know, get. You can get this type of

compute power not for every problem. I know, but like, for a

lot of these big problems that the supercomputers use to the point of four

or five different hair dryers. Right. I think that's going to have

an enormous impact on cost and

environmental concerns. Absolutely. Interesting.

Well, we're almost at the end of our time. I want to be respectful

of your time. It's great talking to you again. And next time I'm in Boston,

I will look you up. And where can

folks find out more about you and Quera?

Quera.com Q U-E-R-A.com

Awesome. And any parting thoughts?

We live in exciting times, and if you're not part of this

revolution, then you should really consider joining. It's a

lot of fun. It's a lot of science, it's a lot of hard work. But

it's only once in decades that you can

live at the outset of a true revolution in

computing. And if you regret not being there when

AI got started, think about quantum.

Excellent. And with that, we'll let RAI finish the show. And there

you have it. A crash course in neutral atoms, quantum

deployments, and why your next supercomputer might just run

on lasers and not on megawatts A huge thank you to

Yuval Boger for joining us once again and proving that you

don't need a cryogenic chandelier to make serious quantum strides,

just a few billion perfectly identical atoms and

the occasional science pun. If this episode has you

curious, confused, or oddly nostalgic for

your physics degree, head over to Cura.com to learn more.

And remember, whether you're a policymaker, a software

engineer, or a marketer wondering what all the quantum fuss

is about, now is a rare chance to be part of something

truly revolutionary. Until next time, this has

been Impact Quantum, where we don't just observe the future,

we superposition ourselves into it. Be sure to

subscribe, leave a review, and as always, stay

curious, stay quantum, and for goodness sake, keep

your lasers aligned.