Quantum Computers Aren't Useless. You Just Don't Know How to Use Them.
4/20/202613 min
Sabine Hossenfelder says quantum computers are only useful for breaking codes. She's wrong — and my undergraduates are building the proof. What's happening in my lab right now has nothing to do with cryptography, and everything to do with the future of AI. I'm a cosmologist at UC San Diego teaching undergraduates to build, program, and eventually launch quantum computers — possibly to the Moon via Artemis! We cover: why Sabine's code-breaking verdict misses the real story, how free tools like Quantum Rings are closing the education gap Sabine thinks is a hardware problem, why Q-Day just got moved up to 2029, what my students are actually doing with quantum computers in my lab, and why the next generation of quantum physicists won't need a billion-dollar facility to train. The bottleneck isn't the hardware. It's what we're teaching — and who we're teaching it to. Use my special link to get access to the course and apply for the summer 2026 internship: https://www.quantumrings.com/iti Watch Sabine’s video https://youtu.be/qV7hQEtr3ic?si=EPcg5fAw_18QaKhM Timestamps: 00:00 Quantum Is More Than Codebreakingt 00:51 The Week Q-Day Jumped Years Aheadt 02:38 Why Quantum Felt Useless (Until Now)t 04:42 What Happens If Encryption Fails Quietlyt 05:33 The Tool That Changes Everythingt 07:37 From Beginner to Running Algorithmst 09:26 The Infrastructure Behind the Shiftt 10:58 The Real Bottleneck: Not Physicst 11:59 The Opportunity Everyone’s Missingt ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpAt Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFut Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9Ut Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Unt 🌐 More: 🏄♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #sabinehossenfelder #bobwold #quantumcomputer #quantumcomputing #quantumencryption #quantumsupremacy #quantumsimulation #quantumalgorithms #aiandquantum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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First 90 secondsBrian Keating· Host0:00
My friend Sabine Hossenfelder just made a video that got nearly a half a million views in just a couple of days. Her conclusion, quantum computers are basically only good for doing one thing, breaking codes. Now, Sabine is brilliant, and she's right that the code-breaking progress is terrifying. Google just moved up Q-day, the date in which quantum supremacy takes place, to about twenty twenty-nine, less than three years away. And as I've often said, quantum computers seem to be really good at doing one thing in particular, which is to simulate how quantum computers work. But I think Sabine has missed a bigger story because right now in my lab at UC San Diego, I'm teaching my undergraduates to build quantum computers and then to program them and then eventually to launch them into space and maybe, just maybe, use them for AI in space, perhaps on the Moon, thanks to Artemis II. You'll hear from these brilliant undergraduates later on, and when you do, you'll see that what they're doing has nothing to do with breaking code. And by the end of this video, you can do it, too, for free. Let me give Sabine her due because the news this week is really extraordinary. Three papers dropped in a single week. First, Google found an algorithm that breaks encryption twenty times faster than anything we've ever had before. That cuts the qubit requirement from ten million down to roughly half a million. They thought this was so sensitive they wouldn't even publish the algorithm. Instead, they used something called zero-knowledge proof, basically a math way of proving that, "Trust us, bro," without showing you exactly how it does so. Second, a startup called Oratomic says that they can break RSA encryption with just twenty-six thousand qubits