Chetan Nayak
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Chetan Nayak’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So there are all kinds of lessons that we have ended up learning over the last 20 years, and I'm sure we'll learn more as we go forward.
It's really interesting because as these technologies develop, I think usually, or if I look historically at examples, the scientists who built the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project were very aware of the ethical concerns and were some of the earliest people to think about the ethics of nuclear disarmament, for instance, or strategies thereof.
And you can see AI researchers, even five to 10 years ago, were thinking very hard about the ethical issues. That's very much true in quantum computing as well.
In fact, it turns out that one of the things that really caused a big uptick in interest in quantum computing was Peter Shor's discovery of the algorithm that's named after him, Shor's algorithm, in which he showed that quantum computers could break the most popular crypto system that we currently use if the computer were large enough, a large enough scale and stable enough.
That actually took quantum computing, made it very interesting to people other than scientists. you know, and engineers. But what's interesting is that quantum physicists had also been thinking about very safe encryption methods and very safe ways of exchanging messages, also by taking advantage of quantum mechanics, what's sometimes called quantum communication, and
for at least as long, if not longer. So I think one of the really good things is that we have gotten out ahead of this in terms of cryptography. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology has already gone through a process of vetting different, what are called post-quantum cryptography or crypto systems that are safe to quantum attacks, standardized around a number of them.
And it will be a journey. It's not going to happen overnight to replace our current systems with ones that are safe to quantum attacks. But the good thing is we have already started that journey.
Well, first of all, I think skepticism is healthy and normal in science. Scientists aren't a monolith. They don't all circle the wagons and all say the same thing. My experience is that it's always the opposite, that any new result is met with a lot of questions. Healthy skepticism, especially when you do something that's not incremental, that's a big leap.
There's going to be skepticism and questions. We did just publish a paper in Nature, as you mentioned, presenting some of our results. That's a peer-reviewed journal that in turn built on work. So I think this is kind of a natural part of science. We feel really good about our results.
We have, of course, shared a lot more with DARPA because of the ability to, under a nondisclosure agreement, work with the U.S. government on them actually coming into our labs and measuring some of our devices and
And so that is a really great opportunity for us because, you know, some of the mystery about our program is because, of course, we are building a proprietary technology and we cannot share every detail of what we've done or how we do it, as is normal for companies. But, you know, with the U.S. government, we can share a lot of that information.
So that's a great ability for us to get that kind of external vetting.
Yeah, first of all, you're right. It is a really exciting time in quantum computing. There's a lot of energy in the field. A lot of progress has been made, you know, I would say in the last couple of years. So it's really exciting, and I think that feeds into what I said about really useful and impactful quantum computers being years, not decades away.
With all these different companies, including very big companies, really racing towards the same goal, I think the competition is one of those ties that lifts all boats. So I think it's a really exciting time for quantum computing.
We published a roadmap that explains the part of our roadmap that we can share that is sort of more scientific and doesn't reveal too many of the details that are trade secrets. It's a part of what we worked on with DARPA. It's a roadmap of delivery for them. So for us, it's the next step on that roadmap towards computers that are of the scale.
So it's going to be devices of greater complexity that have more capabilities. as well as improving the stability of the underlying qubits. Those are kind of the two axes along which we, you know, most of our development is occurring and we're marching ahead on both of them. We would love to have, you know, catalysts that can enable us to do that.
We'd love to have catalysts that can break down microplastics. You know, solving chemistry and materials problems maybe doesn't sound, it sounds like a niche thing. You know, it's not the same as, it isn't going to be just like a better Excel spreadsheet or a better version of Microsoft Word or a better browser. On the other hand, 96% of all manufactured goods rely on chemistry materials.
So it's the kind of thing that could impact us all around. Even people who never see a quantum computer, never touch a quantum computer, their lives could be impacted by the materials and chemistry that we could discover with a quantum computer.
Thank you. My pleasure.
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