Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Quantum Computers Aren't Useless. You Just Don't Know How to Use Them.

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Sabine Hossenfelder says quantum computers are only useful for breaking codes. She's wrong — and my undergraduates are building the proof. What's happening in my lab right now has nothing to do with cryptography, and everything to do with the future of AI. I'm a cosmologist at UC San Diego teaching undergraduates to build, program, and eventually launch quantum computers — possibly to the Moon via Artemis! We cover: why Sabine's code-breaking verdict misses the real story, how free tools like Quantum Rings are closing the education gap Sabine thinks is a hardware problem, why Q-Day just got moved up to 2029, what my students are actually doing with quantum computers in my lab, and why the next generation of quantum physicists won't need a billion-dollar facility to train. The bottleneck isn't the hardware. It's what we're teaching — and who we're teaching it to. Use my special link to get access to the course and apply for the summer 2026 internship: https://www.quantumrings.com/iti Watch Sabine’s video https://youtu.be/qV7hQEtr3ic?si=EPcg5fAw_18QaKhM Timestamps: 00:00 Quantum Is More Than Codebreakingt 00:51 The Week Q-Day Jumped Years Aheadt 02:38 Why Quantum Felt Useless (Until Now)t 04:42 What Happens If Encryption Fails Quietlyt 05:33 The Tool That Changes Everythingt 07:37 From Beginner to Running Algorithmst 09:26 The Infrastructure Behind the Shiftt 10:58 The Real Bottleneck: Not Physicst 11:59 The Opportunity Everyone’s Missingt ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpAt Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFut Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9Ut Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Unt 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #sabinehossenfelder #bobwold #quantumcomputer #quantumcomputing #quantumencryption #quantumsupremacy #quantumsimulation #quantumalgorithms #aiandquantum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My friend Sabina Hasenfelder just made a video that got nearly half a million views in just a couple of days. Her conclusion? Quantum computers are basically only good for doing one thing, breaking codes. Now, Sabina's brilliant, and she's right that the code breaking progress is terrifying. Google just moved up Q-Day, the date in which quantum supremacy takes place to about 2029, less than three years away. And as I've often said, quantum computers seem to be really good at doing one thing in particular, which is to simulate how quantum computers work. But I think Sabina's missed a bigger story, because right now in my lab at UC San Diego,

I'm teaching my undergraduates to build quantum computers, and then to program them, and then eventually to launch them into space and maybe just maybe use them for AI in space, perhaps on the moon, thanks to Artemis II. You'll hear from these brilliant undergraduates later on, and when you do, you'll see that what they're doing has nothing to do with breaking code.

And by the end of this video, you can do it too. For free, let me give Sabina her due, because the news this week is really extraordinary. Three papers dropped in a single week. First, Google found an algorithm that breaks encryption 20 times faster than anything we've ever had before. That cuts the qubit requirement from 10 million down to roughly half a million. They thought this was so sensitive they wouldn't even publish the algorithm. Instead, they used something called zero knowledge proof, basically a math way of proving that, trust us, bro, without showing you exactly how it does so.

Second, a startup called Or Atomic says that they can break RSA encryption with just 26,000 cubits in about 10 days, using neutral atom arrays, not the superconducting cubits I'm using in my lab, which are the same that Google and IBM are used. This is a radical speed-up and reduction in complexity. It's awful difficult to get our lab equipment down to just a few tens of millic Kelvin, just a whisper above absolute zero, and far colder than even the CMB, what I study at a balmy three Kelvin. Now, a third paper by another group show that they can do it with 10 times fewer qubits than the original estimates required. Sabina's right, this is real,

and it's accelerating faster than anyone predicted. The researchers themselves are debating whether it's even responsible to publish this stuff. Scott Aronson, one of the top computer scientists alive, said that, said people in the field are reaching the point of wondering, should we publish this or not? In 1982, when I was a wee lad before high school even, accessing a university timeshare computer meant dialing in, often using a clunky acoustic coupler modem that transmitted data at a screaming 300 to 1,200 bits or bought. The procedure was tedious. Pick up your phone, plug it in, wait for the screeching handshake, type a text-based login

and issue an arcane command like RMDRC, Vubar, just to navigate a 24-row monitor. That agonizing lag is the perfect analogy for. for quantum computing five years ago, where you waited in a queue for a noisy 20-20-cubit result from a remote cloud. Today, my friends at Quantum Rings, again, not sponsored, allows you to explosively advance in that timeline right now for free.

It puts a high fidelity quantum circuit simulator with hundreds of qubits and millions of gate operations right on your laptop, replicating Google's $10 million dollar quantum supremacy experiment on your own hardware. It's really a whole new world, and I want my undergraduates and my viewers and listeners in the audience to take advantage of it. The truth is that quantum computing holds immense promise. I mean, unimaginable things.

It's very possible that my grandchildren could grow up in a world where cancer is a thing of the past, because quantum computers have provided real-time computational simulation to let us experiment with these drugs without the burden of manufacturing them ahead of time, where things like EVs could be four to ten times more efficient, drive as far as you need on a single charge with batteries that were made in a very sustainable way with materials that were discovered because of quantum computers, where we could optimize supply chains, solving world hunger if the humans can get out of the way. Literally the biggest societal problems that exist today are in reach for quantum computers. And it's not just science fiction anymore.

This recent video covers three papers in the course of essentially a week that moved the goalpost dramatically for this goal. And we used to think about this as requiring systems that took millions of cubits. now we're talking about hundreds of thousands of qubits. And that essentially brings it from like 2035 to 2040 down to kind of like 2029, 2030 for Q day for when quantum computers will be able to break encryption. And if it happens in the dark, mysterious things are going to start happening and we won't know for sure that it happened. What are they actually good for these quantum computers?

Sabina said, and I'm paraphrasing that apart from the code breaking, nobody has figured out how to turn quantum computing's theoretical advantage into a real world. Quantum chemistry, material science, optimization, financial monitoring. She says, not much there has happened. And again, if you're looking at published breakthroughs, she's not wrong. And see above, as I said, quantum computers are awesome, unrivaled at simulating how quantum computers were. But Simeon is looking perhaps at the wrong metric.

The revolution isn't in the papers, it's in the tooling. Five years ago, if you want to run a quantum circuit, you need to access IBM's cloud. You'd wait in a huge long queue. You'd get a noisy result on maybe 20 cubits, even if you could figure out how to use and you spend more time debugging the interface than doing actual physics. Today I'm going to show you something a free tool where you can use and learn about quantum computing. It's called Quantum 101. It's by Quantum Rings, a quantum computer circuit simulator that runs on your laptop, not 20 cubits, hundreds of them. Millions of gate operations,

high fidelity on your desktop, on your laptop, for free. They replicated Google's quantum supremacy experiment. The one that Google said required a $10 million superconducting. Quantum Ring's doesn't just simulate. Through their open quantum platform, you can write your circuit once and run it on real quantum hardware. And you can do that from multiple hardware vendors around the world. The same code, different machines. Imagine how cool this will be on your resume. They give you $50 in free credits every 90 days. No credit card. You can start breaking things and learning things and fixing things, but you won't break your bank. Quantum Rings built a free course called Quantum 101. And when I say free, I mean actually free, not free trial, then you

pay wallet free forever. You'll learn it. You'll go through. the 14 episodes, they're self-paced, and they're taught by a brilliant student at MIT in the PhD program named Cora Barrett. She works in the Quantum Systems Group in the engineering department with superconducting qubit arrays. The same technology Google and IBM are using for their code-breaking breakthroughs we talked about, and Sabina's mentioned. Cora's not teaching you the theory from a textbook. She's teaching you from the lab. The curriculum takes you from ground zero. Literally zero, not zero Kelvin, but episode one is the math prerequisites and software development kit SDK setup. It's all the way from there to building a hundred-cubit optimization algorithm.

Quora takes you through single-cubit gates, entanglement, Grover's search algorithm, quantum Fourier transforms, Shores-Factoring algorithm, which is literally the algorithm behind the codebreaking news that Sabina broke, teaches you about noise and error mitigation, the real bugaboo's that may be stand in the way of immediately achieving quantum supremacy. The course takes you through variational algorithms and quantum error correction. We'll have some factor of each the I-theta and we call theta the phase. This will come up a lot. Another thing I think is fun is that we can more intuitively see how i squared equals minus one. Again it's totally free not sponsored. I love this group. They work with my students and here's what my students had to say. The biggest surprise was realizing

that quantum physics doesn't have to be intimidating and it's actually kind of mind-blowing. The thing is that quantum one-on-one turned complex theories into pure curiosity basically and made me enjoy it every second of it. The thing that surprised me the most about the quantum 101 course was knowing that qubits can be stole across a wide variety of media, such as neutral atoms, artificial atoms through superconducting cubits and photons. It's really just mind-boring to think of. Just thinking back on their complex theory where we study in our quantum physics classes, I thought it would be much more difficult too.

I saw you run my first quantum hour rhythm in just a few weeks. With quantum 101, it was easy to do that. These are physics undergraduates, including a freshman. Six weeks ago, none of them had touched a cubit. Now, one of them's actually got an internship at one of the top quantum computing labs in the world in the Bay Area. Now, they're all running Shores algorithm on their MacBooks. That's not just a testimonial.

That's data. Okay. Now, lastly, the internship. Why does this matter? And here's the part that makes this urgent. Quantum Rings is hiring summer 2026 interns right now. Here's what their CEO and founder, Bob Wald, had to say, about what he's so excited with.

work with Bob and done, and he's graciously giving me a lot of his time and free access to the, to their Quantum Rings software, walked us through how to get us uploaded and onboarded. So if you're an undergraduate student, graduate student, it doesn't matter. You go through Quantum 101, actually learn the material. Then after you do that, you might be a candidate for one of these positions this summer. Quantum Rings is based in Boulder, Colorado, and they're working with over 250 universities and institutions worldwide, in addition to UCSD. They've executed 10 million circuits and 10 billion quantum gate operations on their platform. That's not a startup that might exist next year. This is the infrastructure layer for the next

generation of quantum developers. The summer 2026 internship applications are open now. I put the link in the description and it's on screen. But here's the thing. These positions will fill up. Democratizing quantum computing is the mission of quantum rings. We build simulators that let you simulate quantum computers as they will be in about five to 10 years on your classical computer. way slower, albeit, than a real computer than a real quantum computer will be. But we let you simulate what a quantum computer will be, so you can start developing the software for it now. We make it free for students and for personal use so that anybody can come and explore

and innovate. We also offer OpenQuantam, which you can find at openquantam.com. That gives you free access to quantum computers. All the commercially available quantum computers will give $50 in free credits every 90 days for people to run and run their own experiments. So let me bring you back to where we started, Sabina's question, what are quantum computers actually good for? It's a great question. Code breaking, yes, and clearly that's terrifying because all of our banking, all of our Bitcoin and so forth, runs on that. But the real reason that there's only one application showing dramatic progress right

now is that code breaking has a clean, well-defined problem with a known quantum speedup. Shore's algorithm has been understood since 1994. The applications in chemistry, material science, physics, drug discovery, optimization, those require people to actually build the circuits, test the algorithms, and find the right problems. That's where a physics and engineering first workforce needs to occur. And it doesn't really exist yet. The bottleneck isn't physics. The bottleneck is people. Right now there's maybe a few thousand people on Earth who can conceptually design and execute a quantum circuit. We need hundreds of thousands. We need a million. And the tools to train them just became free and accessible on a laptop. You don't have to come here

and apply to UCSD and hope and pray you get in just to take a class that may not exist just yet. We're working on it. But for now, we've got quantum rings to help us with their quantum 101 program. And that's the story I think Sabina missed. She may not have known about it, but it's not that quantum computing doesn't work for anything but codebreaking. It's that we haven't had enough people, the entryway to the funnel, to build the tools to help us find out what else it can do and how we can apply what it's doing now. It's like in 1982, me saying, what are personal computers good for, like the Apple 2, playing the Oregon Trail?

We need more people in the funnel to find out what they're actually good for. And go watch Sabina's video. I think it's great. I'll link it right here. And I think she's right about the danger. I just think the opportunity is bigger than she's letting on. If you're a student or a researcher, just curious, go through Quantum 101. Let me know what you thought about it.

Tell me what you built. I want to see it. Subscribe if you want to see more of this. You can learn more from the president of the corporation, the founder of it as well. And if you want to learn more about quantum computing from one of the world's experts, watch my interview with one of the founders, the Titanic intellect, my friend John Preskell, at Caltech. Watch that here.

And don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. See you next time on Into the Impossible. All. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Bucks slot machine by aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million

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