Quantum computers will change the world, thanks to Aussie startups like Q-CTRL

Most people have heard of a quantum computer, but very few know how it works or what it does. In this week's edition of Tech Wrap-Up Australia, we are here to help with that!

We chat to Michael Biercuk — a world leader in the field of quantum mechanics who aspires to help global tech companies build the first workable quantum computers — about the little-known technology, and the pioneering role a bunch of Australian startups are playing in developing it.

We also launch One Minute Pitch, a new segment where entrepreneurs and founders looking to raise the profile of their startup have one minute to state their case. Check out the the pitch from Grant Davies , CEO and Founder of generative AI startup Verbalate.AI .

If you want to make a submission, scroll down to see how to do it.

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Quantum computers — those powered by atoms and subatomic particles — could change the world.

If you believe the hype, then a functioning quantum computer could help improve encryption and machine learning, accelerate drug discovery, speed up financial transactions, create new materials, and even help tackle existential threats like climate change and food security.

The technology isn’t ready yet. But when it is, a handful of Australian quantum technology startups will be at the forefront of the new technological era, due to their early work in developing solutions to help make quantum computing a commercial reality.

Michael Biercuk is one of the world leaders in quantum physics and founder of Sydney and Los Angeles-based Q-CTRL , Australia’s first VC-backed quantum computing startup. He is also a Professor of Quantum Physics and Quantum Technology at the 澳大利亚悉尼大学 .

Biercuk sat down with Tech Wrap-Up at SXSW Sydney to talk about how his company is helping to make quantum computers being developed by global tech companies actually work, and the foundational role Australian scientists and startups are playing in the race to commercialise the technology.

Michael, what is quantum technology and how does it differ to the end goal of developing a functioning quantum computer?

Quantum technology is a totally new kind of technology that leverages the physics we find in very small-size scales — quantum physics. This is what tells us how individual particles of matter, called atoms, behave and how individual particles of light, called photons, behave. Those rules of behaviour are really different than the rules we experience day to day, and they give us access to some totally new capabilities.

Quantum technology is looking to put that to work as a resource, and the two biggest application areas are quantum computing — which involves encoding and processing information for some very hard problems — and quantum sensing, where we look to detect things around us in a way that gives us insights we didn't have previously.

Quantum sensors already exist, and quantum computers are still in development, is that right?

Yeah. When it comes to quantum sensing for example, we are already working with the Australian Defence Force to make a new generation of what are called ‘inertial navigation systems’. So, if you have to navigate like a maritime vessel or an aircraft and you don't have GPS, inertial navigation enables you to do this.

It's a little bit like closing your eyes and walking around. You can figure out where you are in the room by thinking about how you moved. Inertial navigation allows you to position yourself based on measuring how you move. Every commercial vessel already has these things. Every aircraft already has these things. They're just not very good. But the quantum version is better and allows you to navigate for much longer.

For quantum computing, the best way to think about it is different. Just like we use GPUs for some things and CPUs for others. For example, you don't run Facebook on a graphical processing unit from 英伟达 . You run certain machine learning tasks and they get big, big boosts. Quantum computers are similar. They are believed to be good for certain problems — not everything — but those certain problems are so high impact that there's a lot of investment to make this technology real.?

In 10 years from now, how will the world look if quantum computers are a commercial reality?

The world is much more efficient in the way we build transit networks, the way we ship goods, understand climate change, and the way we design power distribution grids. All of these problems can be attacked with quantum computers and can really help us reorganise society, make it much more efficient.

They could also make AI more powerful. There's a lot of interest in new kinds of machine learning powered by quantum computers and new kinds of financial modeling. So, some of the biggest customers right now are banks trying to understand how to optimise portfolios and generate better returns for their shareholders or their investors.

But we aren’t there yet. Why is quantum hardware so prone to error and algorithm failure? And how is that holding the industry back??

Indeed. There's a huge amount of effort building bigger quantum machines, but unfortunately, the bottleneck is that they're not getting better fast enough.

The hardware itself is very susceptible to interference from everything around it — everything from wifi and changes to the Earth's magnetic field, to a truck driving by.

Everything degrades the stored information. Q-CTRL’s focus is on how you solve that problem with infrastructure software to make the machines actually useful.

Tell me about your company, Q-CTRL. What role does it play in helping the entire industry get off the ground?

We are specialists in a discipline called ‘quantum control’, and we take that expertise and turn it into software.

The software is called ‘infrastructure software’. The best example is VMware — which virtualises the hardware so that anybody can build on arbitrary cloud services.

We do something similar for quantum computing. We improve the performance and improve the utility so that application designers can get the best possible performance for their tasks.

I can’t imagine there are too many people out there wanting to buy that software yet. Is big tech your only customer? Granted it’s a valuable one!

Our customer base is platform vendors — the teams that build quantum computers. IBM announced in May this year that our software would run natively on their quantum computers going forward.

We service those vendors. We also sell tools to the end users. But our idea is to be everywhere, to help as many people as possible.?

Australia is seen as a pioneer of this industry, with comparisons sometimes drawn to how we pioneered solar technology. Why is Australia leading on this — it's a big task for a small country?

Like anything it starts with luck and happenstance. In Australia in the 1990s a couple of academics decided this was an exciting area. They got some money from the US government, got matching funds from the Australian government and they built a community.?

That community is what attracts others from abroad. For example, I came here in 2010 as a scientist to join that research community.

It became internationally known because the academics were so strong with putting out such good research. Q-CTRL was the first VC-backed quantum company to emerge from that.

But it really comes down to the fact that people invested in the science and attracted great talent to Australia.

Since then there has been a swathe of cool startups to emerge from this space in Australia — Quantum Brilliance , Silicon Quantum Computing , QuintessenceLabs and Diraq . How does having that community bolster the reputation of the sector overall?

A few of us have decided to make an investment on the industry side. We formed the Australian Quantum Alliance to have a voice to government.

There was a concerted effort to take this from basic academic research into commercial opportunity, and then companies like Q-CTRL have succeeded in gaining major commercial traction internationally, and that gets quite a lot of attention back home in Australia. It is about our community pushing hard to drive big outcomes.?

Australia is often criticised by deep tech founders for outsourcing its problems and looking overseas for solutions, rather than developing them here. At SXSW Sydney you said that when it comes to quantum computing, “This is Australia’s chance to sit at the big kids’ table” and that in order to make us industry pioneers “all we need to do is f*****g get over ourselves.” What did you mean by that, and why the frustration?

It is very simple. Australians, the government and the big end of town need to just listen to the rest of the world.

Everybody is saying, “Australia has got something special”. Everybody is saying, “We want your technology”.

Instead of trying to figure out if this technology is any good or worth pursuing, just listen to the whole world. If everybody else wants what we've got, Australia should want it too.

How are other countries sharing quantum advances? Should Australia be doing that with what we are learning or should we keep this as a commercial advantage? How do you kind of get that balance between protectionism and advancing the industry??

Our view is that there must be open sharing of basic science. And a huge amount of what's going on in the quantum sector is really still just basic science, where we all publish what we're doing.

The next issue that always comes up is IP and IP protection. You are never going to win by trying to build fences around companies to say, “no, no, no, you must keep your IP here”.

You win by making it easy for them to be the first and the best.

We focus on encouragement, not restriction.

And then, yeah, there are some things that should be restricted because they're very, very sensitive defence technologies.But otherwise, it should be as open as possible.

From a talent perspective, are there enough technical workers for Australia’s quantum computing sector yet? How do we train more people?

I actually think the biggest impediment is not the PhD level experts. It's everybody else who needs to be conversant in quantum.

For that, we actually built a product solution called Black Opal , which is like Duolingo for quantum. It is designed to help everybody, whether they're a journalist or a business person or a financier, understand enough in order to really contribute to our sector because we need to go from research to industry.? It takes you from zero knowledge to programming quantum computers. The UK government adopted it for all of its skills training.

How far off are we from seeing quantum computing used in mainstream industry, in the way that a business might buy space on Amazon Web Services or a cloud service? When will businesses be paying a big tech company to use it’s quantum computer?

So right now it's all about early adoption — to be ready for this thing called ‘quantum advantage’, which is when it's better to choose a quantum computer economically than a conventional solution.

I think that comes within the next three, four, five years. And then thereafter, what happens is this bifurcation — that the organisations that invested early win and capture a lot of value, because you're going to take that machine that achieves quantum advantage and build a million of them.

Or you have the part of the sector that suddenly has to play catch-up, because there's this new disruptive technology that they need to build a strategy around. So we are big advocates and investing now to be ready for quantum advantage.?

Andrew Horsley, the Co-Founder of Quantum Brilliance told LinkedIn News Australia earlier this year that he wants to see the earliest adopter be the Australian government, because that puts faith in the technology. Do you agree?

I don't think it needs to be the government, but having government as a customer is a very powerful concept. When I worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US Department of Defence, DARPA was the customer that drove early-stage technology development to a point of sufficient technical maturity that commercial buyers would then pick it up for other purposes.

We know that in a case where there is timing risk, there is relative immaturity of this technology, government can step in and be the demand signal that makes commercial investors comfortable that their risk is being underwritten in a way.?

And what about when it comes to making the public comfortable? If the earlier adopters of quantum technology are using it for defence purposes, does that seem sinister?

If you only invest in a defence-offensive weapons approach, then it paints a rather negative narrative.

But quantum computing and quantum technology broadly impacts transportation, it impacts finance, it impacts everybody.?

What the UK government did, for instance, was built a whole program around all the different parts of the UK government that have problems that are amenable to quantum computing solutions. And then quantum companies contributed to those.

We won one of those contracts. It's a great way to generate demand in a way that's broad-based and doesn't have this negative connotation.?

What are the dangers or potential risks of quantum computing, and do we need to factor those in early from a regulatory viewpoint? Social media, and to an extent generative AI, jumped out of the gates well ahead of regulators, and governments are still trying to play catch-up on those technologies. Will that happen with quantum?

My view on this is that while I am a pro-careful regulation guy, there's a reactionary nature when people talk about quantum because of exactly what you described about AI. People were caught flat-footed with AI.

The reality is most of what we should focus on is the end use applications. About decryption, about new logistics capabilities, about new finance capabilities. We should focus on the applications and what the implications of those are, as opposed to quantum per se. Because whether it's a classical computer that solves the problem or a quantum computer doesn't actually make much of a difference.?

Do you see any risks or dangers or unintended uses? For example let's look at social media — it was all sunshine and rainbows to begin with, it was helping people connect, it was giving a voice and a platform to oppressed people in autocratic countries, but more recently the narrative flipped somewhat, and the technology was used nefariously to chip away at democratic values around the world. What’s the dangers here?

It would be silly to say there are none. The thing about unintended consequences or unknown impact is you don't know them ahead of time. Our sector has looked very hard at what are the potential risks and nothing really unique has come up.

There are impacts from all the different applications, like what if we can decrypt internet communications with a quantum computer. That's an application that totally changes the risk landscape for e-commerce, for government communications. That's the kind of thing that we should think hard about.

But it's again much more about the end use that we can think about as opposed to the technology behind it. As we get better use cases, we need to start thinking hard about the impact of those. We don’t know what many use cases are yet.

Can AI be trained on quantum computers to make it more powerful? And if so, what is the impact of that?

The short answer is we just don't know.

There are some early promising results that say maybe you can do training much faster with a quantum computer. But the data input has to be different. It has to come from quantum sensors.?

There is a world in which we think about a fully networked quantum internet of things, with a quantum internet and a quantum computer at the centre, and you may be able to have some very new machine learning capabilities, but that's quite speculative and it's a long way off.??

These different parts — quantum sensors, quantum networks and quantum computers — all have to be developed and integrated before we see that real impact. Right now, the impact is what we currently do, which is using AI that we build to make quantum computers perform better.

It is a giant accelerant in the way we're able to extract maximum performance from the hardware.

?? Want to learn more about quantum technology and the role the sector could play in advancing Australia's economic prosperity?

Follow Michael Biercuk from Q-CTRL , and Mark Luo and Andrew Horsley from Quantum Brilliance for more insights.

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