John Preskill

So there are these, what's called GKP codes, or grid codes.

GKP is the initials of Guarisman, Kitaev, and Preskill.

They're people who proposed these codes in 2001.

So the way to think about them is slightly different.

So what does this all mean? Like cutting through all the startup press releases and marketing hype, where does this technology actually stand today?

We are currently in an era defined by the acronym NISQ, coined by physicist John Preskill.

It stands for noisy intermediate scale quantum.

We have physical devices with hundreds, even over a thousand qubits, but they are noisy.

Yeah, that is very exciting, but it reminds me of a very practical question that I thought I should ask.

John Preskill, who is your Caltech colleague and also a former Mindscape guest, I remember when he sort of switched from being a quantum field theorist to doing quantum information theory and became the world's expert in quantum error correction.

And I just thought like, oh, well, it's too bad that the useful side of his career is over now.

Like that just sounds so boring, quantum error collection.

It's a measure of quantumness called magic.

Without magic, things are a little too simple, said John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who contributed to Cao's newest paper.

And, you know, quantum spacetime isn't quite that simple.

How to code a universe.

And I'll be honest, if you just look at the headline, you learn almost nothing about what's really going on.

But if you sort of go under the hood and you say, okay, Oratomic, which includes people like John Preskill, who's the Feynman professor at Caltech, so pretty big name, you look under the hood.

They wrote a whole paper about the resource requirements.

These are estimates.

And you're right.

AI, like when you go to the various events and speak to the people, it's not that AI is like finding every answer.

But even John Preskill was noting that the presence of AI absolutely helps them do certain things in the research process faster.

Yeah.