Gideon Lichfield
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Gideon Lichfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This moment when a quantum computer can do something that no classical computer can for the first time.
For Google, quantum supremacy was this milestone.
In their words, it would be like the Wright Brothers moment for quantum computing.
IBM published their own thing saying that Google had got it wrong.
First of all, let's just talk about like the atmosphere of these two places.
It has this kind of sweep to it.
It almost reminds you of something like the Guggenheim Museum.
And it has this museum-y feel to it.
And they have these exhibits of all of the milestones and computing that IBM was part of.
So there's this like weight of history on it that you don't have at all at Google.
The Google lab was in this kind of low-slung office park in Santa Barbara, a very unprepossessing place.
You go in, it's kind of scruffy, there are surfboards on the walls, there's bicycles stored in the corner.
You know, it's very startup-y.
I think it may not be a coincidence that this was also the year when a guy called John Preskill at Caltech coined the term quantum supremacy.
And promised he'd put a working quantum computer chip on his desk within three years that had achieved quantum supremacy.
So he was locked into that target.
Google published this paper saying it had achieved quantum supremacy.
I was thinking, well, this looks big.
I'd been following quantum computing for a long time.
It seemed like this was significant.
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