They wanna leapfrog this noisy era of quantum computing entirely.

Companies that are building smaller machines are hoping that even though we can't implement full error correction on that scale, that something useful can be done.

Uh, but the trouble is is that at the moment we don't really think there are any useful applications that we can point to today and say,, "This is a lot better than what you could do on a conventional computer."

But after some negotiating, Geoff agrees to at least describe the quantum chip that's going to be at the heart of their machine.

Yeah, so the first item here on the left, a silicon chip 300 millimeters in diameter, consists of the photon sources and detectors and all the things in between that allow us to control our qubits.

I describe it as like a CD because when we stand here and look at it, we can see rainbow-like reflections coming off it, and that's because there's all these millionth of a meter scale devices that are on there.

And just like on a CD grooves, they kind of give you that diffraction pattern, that rainbow effect that you see.

So it's quite a beautiful thing to look at.