Guillaume Verdon
speaker
342 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Dec 2023
Guillaume Verdon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Schrodinger dynamics in the loss landscape of the neural network, right? And so, you do an algorithm to induce this phase kick, which involves a feedforward, a kick, and then when you uncompute the feedforward, then all the errors in these phase kicks and these forces backpropagate and hit each one of the parameters throughout the layers.
And if you alternate this with an emulation of kinetic energy, then it's kind of like a particle moving in n dimensions, a quantum particle. And the advantage in principle would be that it can tunnel through the landscape and find new optima that would have been difficult for stochastic optimizers.
But again, this is kind of a theoretical thing, and in practice, with at least the current architectures for quantum computers that we have planned, such algorithms would be extremely expensive to run.
Yeah, I mean, some of the original team for the TensorFlow Quantum Project, which we started in school at the University of Waterloo, there was myself. Initially, I was a physicist, a mathematician. We had a computer scientist. We had a mechanical engineer, and then we had a physicist that was experimental primarily. And so...
putting together teams that are very cross-disciplinary and figuring out how to communicate and share knowledge is really the key to doing this sort of interdisciplinary engineering work. I mean, there is a big difference. In mathematics, you can explore mathematics for mathematics' sake. In physics, you're applying mathematics to understand the world around us.
And in engineering, you're trying to hack the world, right? You're trying to find how to apply the physics that I know, my knowledge of the world to do things.
Right. I think that an overall theme of my company is that we have folks that are, you know, there's a sort of exodus from quantum computing and we're going to broader physics-based AI that is not quantum. So that gives you a hint. So we should say the name of your company is Extropic. Extropic, that's right.
And we do physics-based AI primarily based on thermodynamics rather than quantum mechanics. But essentially, a quantum computer is very difficult to build because you have to induce this sort of zero temperature subspace of information. And the way to do that is by encoding information. You encode a code within a code within a code within a code.
And so there's a lot of redundancy needed to do this error correction. But ultimately, it's a sort of algorithmic refrigerator, really. It's just pumping out entropy out of the subsystem that is virtual and delocalized that represents your quote-unquote logical qubits, aka the payload quantum bits in which you actually want to run your quantum mechanical program.
It's very difficult because in order to scale up your quantum computer, you need each component to be of sufficient quality for it to be worth it. Because if you try to do this error correction, this quantum error correction process in each quantum bit and your control over them, if it's insufficient, it's not worth scaling up. You're actually adding more errors than you remove.
And so there's this notion of a threshold where if your quantum bits are of sufficient quality in terms of your control over them, it's actually worth scaling up. And actually, in recent years, people have been crossing the threshold, and it's starting to be worth it. And so it's just a very long slog of engineering.
But ultimately, it's really crazy to me how much exquisite level of control we have over these systems. It's actually... Quite crazy. And people are crossing, you know, they're achieving milestones. It's just, you know, in general, the media always gets ahead, right, of where the technology is. There's a bit too much hype. It's good for fundraising, but sometimes...
you know, it causes winters, right? It's the hype cycle. I'm bullish on quantum computing on a 10, 15 year timescale personally, but I think there's other quests that can be done in the meantime. I think it's in good hands right now.
Yeah, it's a D-state qubit. It's a multidimensional. Multidimensional. Multidimensional. So it's like, can you have a notion of an integer floating point that is quantum mechanical? That's something I've had to think about. I think that research was a precursor to later work on quantum analog digital conversion.
There was interesting because during my master's, I was trying to understand the energy and entanglement of the vacuum. of emptiness. Emptiness has energy, which is very weird to say. And our equations of cosmology don't match our calculations for the amount of quantum energy there is in the fluctuations. And so I was trying to hack the energy of the vacuum, right?
And the reality is that you can't just directly hack it. It's not technically free energy. Your lack of knowledge of the fluctuations means you can't extract the energy. But just like the stock market, if you have a stock that's correlated over time, the vacuum's actually correlated. So if you measured the vacuum at one point, You acquired information.
If you communicated that information to another point, you can infer what configuration the vacuum is in to some precision and statistically extract, on average, some energy there. So you've quote-unquote teleported energy. To me, that was interesting because you could create pockets of negative energy density, which is energy density that is below the vacuum, which is very weird because...
We don't understand how the vacuum gravitates. And there are theories where the vacuum or the canvas of space-time itself is really a canvas made out of quantum entanglement. And I was studying how decreasing energy of the vacuum locally increases quantum entanglement, which is very funky. And so the thing there is that
if you're into weird theories about UAPs and whatnot, you could try to imagine that they're around and how would they propel themselves, right? How would they go faster than the speed of light? You would need a sort of negative energy density. And to me, I gave it the old college try, trying to hack the energy of the vacuum and hit the limits allowable by the laws of physics.
But there's all sorts of caveats there where you can't extract more than you've put in, obviously.
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