Today, I’m talking with Jerry Chow. He’s the director of quantum systems at IBM, meaning he’s trying to build the future one qubit at a time.
IBM made some announcements this week about its plans for the next 10 years of quantum computing: there are new chips, new computers, and new APIs. You’ll hear us get into more of the details as we go, but the important thing to know upfront is that quantum computers could have theoretically incredible amounts of processing power and could entirely revolutionize the way we think of computers… if, that is, someone can build one that’s actually useful.
Here’s Jerry, explaining the basics of what a quantum computer is:
A quantum computer is basically a fundamentally different way of computing. It relies on the laws of quantum mechanics, but it just changes how information is handled. So instead of using bits, we have quantum bits or qubits.
A regular computer — the quantum folks call them “classical computers” — like an iPhone or a laptop or even a fancy Nvidia GPU works by encoding data in bits. Bits basically have two states, which we call zero and one. They’re on or they’re off.
But the laws of quantum mechanics that Jerry just mentioned mean that qubits behave very, very differently. They can be zero or one, but they might also be a whole lot of things in between.
You still have two states: a zero and a one. But they can also be in superpositions of zero and one, which means that there’s a probability that when you measure it, it will be zero or one with particular probability. In terms of how we physically build these, they’re not switches anymore, they’re not transistors, but they’re actually elements that have quantum mechanical behavior.
One of my favorite things about all this is that in order to make these new quantum computers work, you have to cool them to within fractions of a degree of absolute zero, which means a lot of companies have had to work very hard on cryogenic cooling systems just so other people could work on quantum chips. Jerry calls early quantum computers “science projects,” but his goal is to engineer actual products people can use.
You’ll hear Jerry talk about making a useful quantum computer in terms of “utility,” which is when quantum computers start to push against the limits of what regular computers can simulate. IBM has been chasing after utility for a while now. It first made quantum computers available on the cloud in 2016, it’s shipped System One quantum computers to partners around the world, and now, this week, it’s announcing System Two along with a roadmap for the future. It’s Decoder, so I asked Jerry exactly how he and his team sit down and build a roadmap for the next 10 years of applied research in a field that requires major breakthroughs at every level of the product. Oh, and we talked about Ant-Man.
It’s a fun one — very few people sit at the bleeding edge all day like Jerry.
Okay. Jerry Chow, director of quantum systems at IBM. Here we go.
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