Carmi Levy

Thanks for having me.

I feel like quantum computers has mostly been a smoke and mirrors topic.

You know, like I was in undergrad studying software engineering.

What?

I graduated 15, 20 years ago, something like that.

And even then it was like, oh, we're just on the brink of this thing.

Of course, every major company has a research group on it.

IBM, Google, I'm sure governments are looking into this.

But how close are we to a viable quantum computer?

Well, originally, what they call post-quantum cryptography, the point at which quantum becomes capable of breaking current encryption standards, that was originally around 2035.

The thinking was that quantum computers would get so good by then that they would be able to break encryption within a reasonable timeframe.

Because if you try to use a current classical computer to break most methods of encryption today, it'll take hundreds of years for it to chew through all the math.

But throw a quantum computer at it because it's so much more powerful,

It'll take minutes, hours, maybe even a couple of days, but it will be much more possible, much more feasible.

And so Google essentially said, no, we're moving the goalposts.

Originally, we thought it was 2035-ish.

Now we're going to say it's around 2029.

Well, that's three years away.

So that's kind of frightening because now all of a sudden it kind of means we're moving a lot faster than we thought we were.

And we're going to get to this sort of jolt point for planet Earth a lot sooner than we thought we would.