Entangled Things

In Episode 149, Patrick and Ciprian take stock of where the money in quantum is flowing. The conversation covers IBM's plan to invest more than $10 billion over five years, the US Department of Commerce's nine letters of intent totaling over two billion dollars under the CHIPS Act, and QEra's $230 million raise with Nvidia involvement. The team dig into which modalities are getting the spotlight, why neutral atoms are drawing attention, and what Microsoft's Majorana 2 bet could mean if it hol...

In Episode 148, Gustavo Cancelo, Senior Scientist at Fermilab near Chicago, joins Patrick and Ciprian to talk about QICK, the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, an open source platform developed at Fermilab that has become a widely adopted tool for quantum control and readout across four continents. Gustavo walks through what quantum control actually involves, why calibration and characterization are as important as the qubits themselves, and how QICK's MIT license and affordability have lo...

In Episode 147, Steve Girvin returns for his third appearance to take stock of where quantum stands across research, hardware, and the commercial landscape. The team cover the ongoing challenge of discovering new quantum algorithms — and why better hardware may be what unlocks them — before moving into the state of the three leading modalities: superconducting qubits, trapped ions, and neutral atoms. Steve walks through the wiring problem facing superconducting systems at scale, why cold atom...

In Episode 146, Bob Coecke, Founder and CEO of Relational Intelligence returns alongside Alessandro Cheli, Categorical Machine Learning Operations at Relational Intelligence, to introduce two brand new companies. The bulk of the conversation covers Relational Intelligence, built on the idea that intelligence — human, mechanical, or otherwise — is better understood through relationships than through the reductive, static frameworks that dominate western scientific thinking. The team dig into r...

In Episode 145, Fred Chong returns to discuss what's new at Infleqtion, now a public company, and the work that's keeping him busy across both academia and industry. The team dig into Quantum for Bio, a multimodal cancer biomarker discovery project developed with Welcome Leap and now continuing with IBM, where hybrid quantum-classical algorithms are uncovering relationships between genes, RNA, and tumor imaging that classical methods haven't been able to tackle. Fred shares Peter Shor's persp...