Experimental physicist Maria Spiropulu brings quantum networking out of national labs with 4Quantum

Speaker 1: from four Quantum. Welcome to the show. What's going on? Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down to the studio. Since it is the first time on the show, I would love for you to start with an introduction on yourself and the company, your work. Sure.

Speaker 12: Thank you for inviting me Of this is really great and I have watched a few of your shows already. I'm a particle physicist Mhmm. Experimental particle physicist. I have worked for about thirty years in colliding particles Mhmm. At CERN and before that at Fermilab in Batavia,

Speaker 1: Illinois. Where did you collide your first particle?

Speaker 12: The first particle I collided as an undergraduate at CERN Okay. And it was an electron and a positron Okay. In an experiment called Delphi. Okay. And I belonged to a group called Technical Assistant Two. Technical Assistant Two. Two. Okay. I was an undergraduate in physics and the group was run by a Todorosov. He's not anymore at CERN. Okay. He went on to do medical applications of accelerators. Interesting. And then I went to grad school Yeah. In The US and I stayed. Yeah. And I continued colliding particles but It's addictive. It's addictive.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I've always heard particle acceleration has medical applications. I've never really been able to make the the the jump logically. Do you have an idea of how that works?

Speaker 12: Of course. Of course. We are using so the in the electromagnetic spectrum Mhmm. You are using from x rays to radio Sure. To the whole spectrum. Yeah. So particles, gamma rays and so on occupy one part of this spectrum that makes it like a super microscope if This you is how we talk about accelerators. So when you do an x-ray Yeah. It's a light at a particular frequency

Speaker 1: Yeah. But then shows you what what is going on. Yeah. So the setting But it doesn't seem zoomed in. It it Yeah. I see an x-ray, it seems like I'm seeing the inside, but I'm not seeing anything like a microscope. It's not a deeper it's not a smaller more micro view. It's the full view of my chest if I'm getting a chest x-ray. That's correct. Yes. But if you do the electron

Speaker 12: microscope Yeah. Or if you do higher energy Yeah. Or if you do different kinds, you can see what you are not able to see with normal optical microscopes. Okay. Same thing with the x rays. You cannot see with your eye Sure. What the x-ray sees. Yeah. So in that sense it's not like a zoomed view. Yeah. The the zoomer is the fact that you went and you took a Fermi sort of size of and the you are able with this machine to actually image stuff that you cannot see on the other parts of the spectrum. Mhmm. So particle accelerators are good for that, they are now good for another host of aspects, you can do fabrication of chips, you can be they can be used in various different ways. Okay. And in fact our government is trying to do that, to take them from the basic science to the actual fabrication in different ways compared to TSMC and so on. So there is good, good application. Yeah. We love particle accelerator. At Fermilab I was colliding protons with antiprotons. Yeah. So we went from electrons and positrons to proton, antiprotons and then at the LHC back in Geneva with the American group we are colliding now protons with protons and this is how we discovered the Higgs. The Higgs boson. So all of these ecosystem of systems and detectors, sensors with hundreds of millions of channels, we have underground, we put them where the beams collide and we try to discover new particles, that's how we discovered the Higgs that was hypothesized half a century ago. Mhmm. Beyond that we try to solve problems or puzzles like dark matter Mhmm. Dark energy and

Speaker 1: so on. Now Do we need a larger Hadron Collider or is the current Large Hadron Collider large enough?

Speaker 12: We are now, right now I'm sending and shipping parts for the for the high luminosity for the next phase of the Large Hadron Collider. Okay. And we have with CERN a study, a full feasibility study for a 90 miles collider how big a collider can we build that accesses 10 times more energy scale so that we have a good chance to discover what is dark matter if it is a particle or if it is not a particle to exclude and discover other quantum states that we don't have in our books right now. Yeah. So it's a discovery physics. Okay. In the meantime, the benefit of building this will be massive structures that can help with saving electricity, with superconducting. There is technology innovation. Sure. There is breakthroughs that immediately go to the community, to the society. So there is a cost benefit proposition. And that is the most tractable example right now of Right, because it is studied already for ten years, because it is international. CERN is an intergovernmental organization. The US has tremendous influence without us giving a dime, there's no money exchanged. Mhmm. We are paying our own scientists, we're building our own detectors and then we collocate because we don't have, we don't want to go in a green field and start digging and spending all this money for that. There is, there is a very good sort of interdependency for this field. Now to go to the question about quantum networks, in particle physics we have data acquisition systems, we develop FPGAs with AI on the front end, we develop application specific circuits A6 with lower power consumption in order to handle the petabytes and petabytes of data that we have been producing decades before the internet and before Facebook and Meta and Twitter and so So on and so had to build our own cloud. Yeah. Before cloud was a thing, we called it the grid because we couldn't put our data in one place. But all of these technologies now, you take them when you are building quantum networks, quantum networks with distribution of entanglement and with applications that are important for the society and topical such as as you know and you had it in in in your show here Mhmm. I think two weeks ago. Yeah. The the Q Day is coming, quantum Okay. Computers are And they're coming about six years earlier if we trust the Google folk who Yeah. Who are working on this very diligently and they're making progress that led them to move the quantum day earlier. Yeah. And you had it in the show, a lot of other shows had various people talking about that. But when we take all this technology from the basic science that we developed it, with all this collaboration, with all these systems engineers, systems integration, can take it and build systems that you then use an application to in in the case of BOR quantum technology to secure the digital future for sure. Mhmm. Like the ultimate, the physics based security.

Speaker 2: There's other securities that have been developed that you hear So so, yeah, be before we get into what what Borg and your your new company is working on, over the last over the last thirty years can that you've been sort of working in the field, how have you processed all the different attempts to commercialize the research? There's a bunch of quantum computing companies today that are public. We've had people on the show coming on talking about Sure. Shorting these companies. It can be dangerous to short even if they're not necessarily close to any type of breakthrough. But how have you how why why did you wait until now to go into the to the commercial side and and yeah, how did you process all the other attempts around commercialization?

Speaker 12: It sounds like a trap question but it isn't. I know you mean it. So let me let me answer. So for No trap. For me personally, for my team people that have worked from basic science all the way now to making an application, it wasn't a year, right? I've been working on quantum networks with the funding from the Department of Energy since February when we did the National Quantum Initiative, it became law of the land in '18 and then we did the quantum internet blueprint, the government was interested. Just as we set up the internet back in the day with Xerox, UCLA, the Department of Defense and all the players, can we do the same for the national laboratories of the Department of Energy, the Office of Science and the NNSA, the nuclear laboratories, can we connect them via quantum that's a platform and the backbone to do quantum networking to connect the labs. Why? For reasons that have to do with X, Y, Z, security, national security, research, developing the backbone, etcetera. So that was the original. How now it goes for quantum networking to become to become a solution is we build the technology, we build the field demonstrators in the national labs. We published papers and patents on quantum teleportation, quantum entanglement distribution, the teleportation of entanglement itself. We did a lot of research work and published it and then the application that got interest was cyber security. So cyber security people called and they said the financial sector, the national security sector, others will need this solution. The NSA didn't want to hear about the old QKDs, the quantum key distributions, they're, let's call them one point zero and they were right because they were side attacks, but we have developed the ultimate non attackable, I can say, because I'm an academic still, I can say unhackable and then all the caveats we can put on the side. The quantum computing companies have been going on for forty years and more. Quantum computers were envisioned by Feynman as the ultimate way to solve the quantum universe. The universe at the small scales is quantum. Mhmm. We cannot avoid that, right? Yep. So the the the a quantum computer said Feynman will be the only way you can actually study or emulate or make a digital twin of the actual universe including black holes, wormholes, other other quantum phenomena. If dark matter is a matter of entanglement, then that too. So he thought of the quantum computer in those terms. When the various architectures, there's many architectures, you can build quantum bits in any system that has two states, it can toggle from one state to another. So it can be transmon, superconducting, qubits, atoms, ions, photons, there is all these companies and they started making progress from basic research to actually preparing systems and all of this is great. Now, as an as I'm not a business person, you know that people there is the hype cycle for everyone and you know that people will jump over the top, they will go into the enlightenment, some people will skip the whole jump and go slowly slowly under the table. I think I am one, if I want to characterize this, I try to minimize hype and go to the Yeah. End result by demonstrating, but it doesn't matter, hype is okay as long as nobody gets destroyed in terms of money, which is your business, okay? So as long as the platforms that everyone is preparing, we know what good it is for and what what challenges it might create for the world. So for example, there's the quantum sword and the quantum shield. There is the computer that will solve X, Y, Z, you hear from the hype curve and in reality it will emulate the quantum universe and also it will demolish all our encryption standards. Mhmm. So okay, so how do we protect ourselves from that? We have the quantum shield, we have the quantum What is the positive view here? Because it feels like

Speaker 1: it would be very rational for the public to push back and say, hey, let's just not let's just not break cryptography with quantum computing and then we don't need quantum proof cryptography because we didn't break it. Yeah. But this is regressive. This is the pause AI Yes. Thing the transducer.

Speaker 12: Exactly. But How do how do you react to that? Yeah. I mean, you see it with AI. The same thing, right? Why do we need AI if we could do everything we could do and we will save the jobs? In the progress of of the human civilization, we take the bait of doing better and doing what is challenging Yeah. Every single time and advancing the technology. Mhmm. The question that stands for AI as well as quantum as well as whatever other technology that will come in the future is is are we involving also the anthropologists and the humanists and the artists to hear Yeah. Something about how to protect the humans. Yeah. Because the mathematicians and the physicists and the engineers we don't know how to do that. I I I just mean like in

Speaker 1: the in the AI debate there's you know obviously the the fear of powerful AI systems, you know, hacking computers and so we need AI to defend against that. And and and and you can sort of net that out. But then you can have a separate conversation about like, well, if you're trying to learn math, an AI tutor might help you. Or if you're sleepy and need to get across town, a self driving car might be able to drive you there. Like there are very very tractable examples of of AI products that are just beneficial. And then so the AI community has sort of had to grapple with all of the knock on effects. The quantum community feels like we're purely in like we're breaking cryptography and then we're solving that problem, but there's not enough focus on like the positive benefits that are worth it. Are are there clear Well, I mean, in the evolution of computing Yeah. You are going to have compute with less power. Okay. Are going The the

Speaker 2: argument to figure out the security side is just that you can't just sit there and hope like, well, I hope, let's just all agree to not

Speaker 1: do this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You go to the geopolitical discussion. Geopolitical side. Yeah. And maybe that's the only solution. But you you would always hope that there would be more positive effects to justify investment besides just pure defensive. To be sure, but you know before q date maybe Yeah. That

Speaker 12: AI will break will break Sure. All of our systems. So what is what what do we do then? How do we do we protect ourselves from that? Okay. Then we're using quantum networking, quantum encryption to to safeguard for the AI. But with a quantum computer Yeah. Once you build it, calculations of molecules, quantum chemistry, emulations, I mean Can potentially be more efficient? It can potentially be actually done. Oh. You will have discovery of new materials because you will do what is called designer Hamiltonians, new alloys, new the the quantum computer is limitless, this is why it sells. Mhmm. It is, you can do everything that you cannot do with physics today, you can do on a quantum computer and you will unveil the entire universe. Now, have to say that quantum and AI are going to merge quantum AI. Sure. So, you are going to use quantum resources in order to boost AI and in order to make it more efficient if you want as a coprocessor or as a preprocessor, you can use quantum And you see in fact, I think last month NVIDIA put out something which is called Vera Rubin and Vera is a GPU and or Vera is a powerful CPU. CPU. Robin is a Rubin is a GPU and they put something like a quantum link which is a fiber with an FPGA Mhmm. So that you can do optical. I think it's a marketing buzzword. Yeah. It says I don't think it's actually a quantum computer. No, no. It's not a quantum link, it's a marketing. That's why they they named it NVQ link. Yeah. But once you attenuate light to close to be at the photon level, you start talking about quantum. When you say precise, when something you push the precision Yeah. Frontier, you can start calling it quantum even if it doesn't have quantum entanglement, quantum superposition and the whole quantum attributes. You you the when you're pushing it at the level at a level of a single particle and you manipulate it like that. I mean the psych the psych mission is sending data, think it bypassed now Mars, it left in 2023. It's an asteroid mission to to catch up with the psych asteroid. It's a JPL NASA mission. Sure. The the way the communication is happening is with a deep optical space through almost quantum links, optical links, but once we get them into quantum links, this will be the way and the detectors that JPL built are the ones that then I go to do the quantum networking, are the ones that now we're putting in test beams at CERN in order to see what else, what kind of quantum sensing applications we find for fundamental physics will be the ones that eventually will be used in PET scanners possibly. And so there is a there is a fast and massive movement of technology for all this precision, for all this precision quantum quantum applications, quantum sensing, quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum materials, many body quantum physics that is what we used to have solid state physics is now many body quantum physics. Sure, sure. So the the books are are are being written now a very fast evolution where the physics, the applied physics, the compute the AI are going to be there is a consilience and they're going to be merging towards both applications that have to do with the application of the universe, why we are here, how did we came about, what is the the the quantum origins of space time and the universe, and also with applications like the ones we are talking about. That's very exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming down to this show. Yeah. Great rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you. Our

Speaker 1: next guest is joining in just We a will continue. There is a there is a debate on the timeline about a lot of things. The the the red button and the blue button are still going hot and fast in various. But people are debating goblin mode and the appearance of goblins in the model in open AI models. People are having fun with that. The best take I talk I I saw on this was from Tinder. GPT 5.5 has goblins and can think. Claude four point seven doesn't have goblins and can think. So it's not the goblins that make the models think. It's something else entirely. I like that transposition from the house has windows, the car has windows, the car can drive. So it's not the car. It's not the windows that make the car go. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about quantum computing which we can run through. The quantum computing companies are in a race to go public. I thought a number of quantum computing companies were already were already public but more of a deep dive on what's coming down the pipeline. It could be years until quantum computing delivers on its promise to revolutionize everything from financial trading to drug discovery but that's not stopping the companies developing quantum hardware and software from speeding headlong into the public markets. Three different quantum computing companies inflection with a q Xanadu which is

Speaker 5: what is Xanadu from? Isn't that a song or something? Xanadu is like the Hearst Castle, the fictional Hearst Castle from From

Speaker 2: yeah. An idyllic luxurious or an exotic place often representing a perfect paradise or a labyrinth. Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane. It was its own movie. It's a 1980 American

Speaker 1: musical fantasy film. Xanadu. I don't know I don't know enough about Xanadu. What a funny name for a company. And then Horizon Quantum, those have gone public in the recent months while another five have announced plans to do so later this year. By contrast, before this year there were only four pure play public quantum companies, D Wave, Rigetti, IonQ and Quantum Computing Inc. There's so much app there's so much appetite for quantum assets in the market right now said Antony Legault, the Legault, the not Legault, the VP of Equity Research at Wedbush. If you have Quantum in your company name you're worth at least 1,000,000,000 from the get go. The enthusiasm is helping upstarts nab much higher valuations than they could get on the private markets he said and it's funding their ability to poach in demand talent and build the tech that could ultimately make them first to market with a truly game changing quantum computer, a development that could be worth tens of billions in addressable market apparently. Strike while the iron's hot and the proverbial iron is really hot in quantum right now. It is interesting how there's a wildly different piece of the public markets in quantum computing that's going on amid the AI boom. The quantum computing is like it feels like it's in the GPT one era maybe. Like it's Yeah. Was gonna I was gonna I was gonna ask her like when are we

Speaker 2: are we gonna get can we get a chat GPT moment in quantum? Something

Speaker 1: to to to kind of just ground what you guys are up to. It it also just feels like peering into the future and being like, oh, okay. So, like, like, the fear based marketing is definitely coming from the quantum compute community if we're not careful here. Like, let's let's stay focused on, like, the better CAT scans and better X rays and medical applications maybe. Because just the idea that we're gonna break we're gonna break every every cryptography protocol and then create the solution, That doesn't feel like value creation. It feels like maybe we gotta do it because of geopolitics, but it doesn't it doesn't feel like aspirational. Anyway, there's some public veterans. These are veteran I didn't realize that d wave d wave was founded in 1999. It's an $8,000,000,000 company, almost 400 employees. It went public in 2022. IonQ went founded in 2015, so $17,300,000,000 company. Quantum Computing Inc. Is 2,000,000,000, founded in 2018. And Rugetti, founded in 2013, is a $6,000,000,000 company with a 164 employees. And then there's a bunch more that are that are have gone out more recently, some as low as 600,000,000.

Speaker 2: Some is five This out date. Rugetti is 5 point Oh, it's sold off. 5,300,000,000.

Speaker 1: Okay. Well, people are rotating into tech companies potentially.

Speaker 2: Inflection was found Lot of volatility. Rigetti is up 23% Okay. In the last month. It's down 11% in the last five days Yeah.

Speaker 1: And down 3%. So they are going out via SPACs. Quantum computing promises to leverage. Here you go. The principles of quantum physics to solve problems far beyond the capabilities of today today's best supercomputers with applications across financial trading, drug development, shipping, logistics, Internet delivery, and Internet delivery and aviation. I'm waiting for Jane Street to take a big slice of one of these companies. It has been in development for decades both by pure play quantum companies and tech giants like IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Mean, the big tech companies are are pretty serious about it. I remember when Satya Nadella went on Dorkesh first, like, the reason that he went on the show was to talk about their Majorana chip, their quantum computing efforts. And then very quickly, Dorkesh was like, cool story. Let's talk about AI, which was a great interview. Like it was like, I I wanted to hear much more about the AI build out which became a very important narrative and I think that interview aged very well. But the quantum computing stuff is just so so in in between. Well, what's up? I don't know how we missed this yesterday but the Ankler is moving Yeah. To a new publishing platform created by Ben Thompson. Are you He's going founder mode? Oh, you're not familiar with Passport. He's been building Passport for years. I didn't know that was his company. Yes. And so I thought he was just like No. Got on it early. No. So the history with Ben Thompson is that he he founded Stritecari before Substack. And Substack was very much like, let's put the Ben Thompson package in a box for everyone. And I believe that Ben Thompson launched on WordPress and had to sort of build WordPress plugins and custom style guides and do a lot to get stratekari.com into the place it is today, which is from my perspective a fantastic user experience. Even when you need to log in, it just mails you a code. It does all the modern user experience workflows to get you your dedicated podcast feed and your emails and you can tweak everything. But he has since franchised it and gotten a number of other creators on Passport with, I believe, a different economic model. The only criticism of Passport is not a technology one. It's more about a network effects one. So Substack is known for being very good at recycling email subscribers. And so a lot of email newsletters have life cycles. They sort of have churn rates. Some of them have smiling curves. But a lot of folks they come in, they test out one Substack and then they wind up saying, I'm not really opening this one. They get unsubscribed or they unsubscribe or the list gets cleaned and they get pulled off. And Substack does a good job of sort of resurfacing and there's these ranking lists and there's, oh, you signed up for this. Do want to sign up for these other two newsletters? There's bundles. There's bunch of different ways to sort of like ensure that list growth is happening at all times. And with Passport, I think it's a little more bring your own and Ben Thompson had a lot of success on that when he was sharing links on Twitter that would go majorly viral back when he started. And LinkedIn also drove a lot of traffic for him. And so this could make a lot of sense for Angler if they have their own audience. They have different funnels into the ecosystem and they're less focused on being in the Substack ecosystem in in particular. We I believe the Ankler covered us at one point. We did an interview with them. That We should have some folks from the Ankler on the show. I would love to know more about this decision and what it means for the business. Also just where they're taking the Ankler is the interesting question. But you're not alone. A lot of people are confused and they were not familiar that Passport is in fact a platform that Ben Thompson has been building for a number of years. And I guess recently they've partnered with Automatic.

Speaker 2: And so Yeah. We're blessed. You can imagine Automattic being able to put a huge amount of resources towards it. I don't know exactly when they partnered, but

Speaker 1: but yeah. I don't know. We need to we need to watch this Instagram reel of AI potentially taking the job of a very very important member of the American ecosystem. I won't say human, but let's watch this. AI is gonna take my job and it's a golden retriever looking at a robot. AI will never take your job, golden retriever. Stay strong. You are irreplaceable. No robot dog will ever take the job of a real dog. But for certain people, I guess walking a robot dog feels like a stunt, feels like a prank, very funny. But it is funny seeing the the reaction of the dog being like, that thing looks like me. And I feel like there's a little bit of foreshadowing there that when the humanoids start walking around, you're gonna see a lot of videos of people looking at the humanoids with the exact same expression that that golden retriever looked at that robot dog. Anyway, we have our next guest. Stefan Simkin from Squads is in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV event. How are you doing?