Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Nobel Prize Winner: What Quantum Computing Does to AI, Bitcoin, and Your Data | John Martinis

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

What happens after AI? John Martinis — Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the scientist behind Google's quantum computing breakthrough — says most people are focused on the wrong threat.He's the only scientist on Trump's new tech advisory council, alongside Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Jensen Huang. And he has a very different read on where this is all going.In this episode: why quantum computers could crack Bitcoin encryption, which assets are already at risk, why the entire internet needs to switch encryption protocols in the next decade — and why investing in quantum hardware right now mirrors the Nvidia GPU bet before anyone knew what GPUs were for.If you're thinking about your career, your savings, or your business in an AI world — this one changes the frame.Topics: quantum computing, AI future, Bitcoin encryption, cybersecurity, career in tech, future of work, tech investing, Nobel Prize, Silicon ValleyMore from the Silicon Valley Girl: Follow my Newsletter: ⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠

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The internet didn't make libraries faster. It made them irrelevant. AI didn't make search engines better. It made a completely different way of finding answers. And now we have something that's coming that most people haven't even heard of yet. And it does the same thing to computing itself. In December, 2004, Google OnVee, a quantum processor that completed a calculation in minutes.

That exact calculation that would take today's supercomputers longer than the age of the universe. And that is a different category of a machine. And here's where it gets a little scary. A few days ago, Google published another paper. They say quantum computers could crack Bitcoin encryption in nine minutes, using 20 times fewer resources that anyone thought. As someone who holds crypto and is curious about implications of quantum on my data data, life. I wanted to ask questions. So I was in Davos this January and I met the man whose

1985 discovery made all of this possible. He just won the Nobel Prize for it. And President Donald Trump just put him on his science advisory council alongside with Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Jensen Huang. He's the only scientist in that room and he gave me a timeline five to 10 years. And to understand why this matters for your career, you need to understand what he actually discovered. Let's talk to John Martinez. I wanted to talk to you about something that you discovered. So I don't have any experience in quantum physics, but the way I understood it, if you throw a bowl against the wall, it bumps, right? But you discovered that an electron can pass the wall without passing it and be on both sides? Yes. So it's possible that the ball, you know,

the wall can tunnel through the wall and not just bounce off, but every once in a while, actually tunnel through it. And the way I like to say it is that, you know, people are accustomed at quantum mechanics is the physics of atoms and molecules and microscopic particles. In here, we made electrical circuit about that big. And the currents and voltages in that big macroscopic electrical circuit is actually obeying quantum mechanics and showing this tundling phenomenon. That's the moment quantum stopped being just theory.

He proved it works in machines. That's what started everything. So before this discovery, scientists thought quantum mechanics only lived inside atoms. He proved it works in machines. So what does that unlock? What really happened with this idea, and frankly, it's the reason for the Nobel Prize, is that we took this discovery and then people built on it, built on it. And then the idea of quibits and building a quantum computer came along,

which are, does physics naturally fit into this? So it's really kind of the creation of a field of discovery and innovation and technology that these experiments got developed into and why it's important today. Yeah, when you say quantum computer, a lot of people think science fiction, for people who don't know how it affects their daily lives and might affect their daily lives, can you give two or three examples where quantum computers really make a difference? Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals

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Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. The idea I like to talk about is for doing design of materials or molecules or chemistry. And people are very familiar right now how you use computers to design your kitchen, make a mechanical part, design an electronic circuit, you know, other things. So you can build it virtually.

And then when you go and you build it in the real world, building it virtually and the digital is a lot cheaper and better. And you can think about the tradeoffs. Well, a quantum computer would enable you to do that with molecules and, you know, certain atomic molecules. So many moving part? What about drug discovery? I feel like if we're... Yes, and the same kind of thing with drug discovery.

So if you can simulate molecules really well, then you can maybe even just gain some insight. I mean, what I've been told is that, for example, to drug discovery, it's very expensive to do this. And if you can improve, let's just say your insight on how the drug works by 1% or a few percent, that's really valuable and could be worth a lot of money. So it's not like we have to totally change things, but I think just improvements and better insights can be quite valuable for companies. But if we go 10 years forward, what do you think all life is going to look like if quantum computing is everywhere and accessible to everyone? How is it going to change? So there's kind of two things involved in this. First of all, we have to build better hardware.

And then we have to be, you know, think about algorithms, be smarter with the algorithms and the like. And there's just kind of a gap now. And maybe some people think there's not much of a gap. And other people think there's a big gap. But we need to close the gap. And that's me building better hardware, which is what I'm doing in my company. We're trying to do that as well as many other people. and then people have to be more clever.

And what's interesting as you build better hardware, you can test out the algorithms better, and then you can maybe discover exactly what's, you know, what you need to get it to work right. So it's a very interesting time where, you know, everyone's really trying to push these things together and get it to work properly. Yeah, it feels like it's a really fast growing market. According to Quantum and Sider Report, it's going to generate one trillion dollars in economic value in the next 10 years. That's an optimistic scenario that we find useful things to do.

It's quite possible that will happen. And certainly, I like those kind of forecasts because when we try to raise money. But our idea is that what we're really trying to do in our company is make a general purpose error corrected quantum computer. And not that hundreds of physical cubits, what are people now? but you may need a million physical qubits operating the way where the errors go down and and it works properly, where I think the real value will be unlocked and, you know, the long-term value.

Certainly there, you know, if people do this in the next few years, you'll get, you'll get good value. But those kind of numbers you're talking about, you know, our thesis is you're going to build this big computer and make it very well. He's betting on hardware the way Jensen Huang bet on GPUs before anyone knew what they were for. Now, that's the question that has been on my mind since I heard about quantum computing. Yeah, what do you think for all the entrepreneurs who are watching who want to start building something in this field? What are the most exciting markets when it comes to quantum computing?

Is it building hardware or is it like applying the algorithms? Well, there's a lot of effort into algorithms because, building software and algorithms is a relatively low cost. You don't have to buy us. So our company is doing the exact wrong thing, which is investing in building hardware really well. Now, the nice thing is that once you do that, you can be, and you're successful, you can be an extremely successful company.

And I like to think about Nvidia, although they're partnering with TSMC, but they're knowledge of designing the computers and putting together the systems have made them extremely valuable company. And our view on hardware is that, you know, it's possible for us to do that, through that too. So we're taking the hard approach and focusing on the hardware. And then our particular thesis is that if you look at superconducting cubits right now and where they are, I mean, I helped invent all the things to get there. And I think it's great, but it's still kind of a little bit, I'd say, academic or maybe even artisanal fabrication. And that we're trying to use much more established semiconductor tools and fabrication process and the like in order to scale up and make the qubits better.

Yeah. And when it comes to markets, what do I think of the markets that are going to be transformed? most. We talked about health care, finance. Any other market? It's all of the above. And you hear people working working on that. But I like that we have very definite ideas on how to build it. So let me, I can explain this for maybe some of the Silicon Valley types. I really love Peter Till's book Zero to One. Okay. And that kind of in some sense explained my career. So I am very very very much a definite optimist. I want to know what to build. I want to know what to build and make it useful. And that's what that paper was all about. Now, there's a lot of people in this field who are

indefinite optimists. In fact, most people in the United States are. And they have all the ideas like you're talking about. And I think that's great. I'm glad people are pushing that. My particular way my mind works and what's always been successful is to really focus in on something definite you have to do. However, I'm very well aware you're in a startup company. You'll probably have to pivot and think about different things. And we'd be happy to do that once those ideas come to Rish. But the one thing I know for sure is we have to make better qubits and we have to make it scale. We need the hardware.

We need the hardware. Okay. So that's what we're doing, no matter of. what happens. Yeah. I think, so this question has been bothering me for a while. I think you're the right person to ask. Is quantum computing going to break cryptocurrencies?

So the CEO of my company is an expert here, and I'm going to hopefully represent it well enough. My understanding is if you have some of the older cryptisc currency, that was encoded in a way that could be broken. But some of the newer versions, it's a little bit stiffer encryption. Is that Bitcoin, the oldest? I think this is Bitcoin, as I recall. So that ones. And then you can take your old Bitcoin and, you know, pull it out and then re-encrypt it to make it better. So you can make it.

it's safe. Okay. But there's a lot of Bitcoin that's kind of unclaimed that's old and it's a lot of money. Oh, interesting. So what's quantum computer computing breaks into that? So that is a market for a quantum computer. Business idea. Well, so we're aware of that, okay? And that's fine. Now, what my CEO is doing, which I think is very responsible, is talking to the U.S. Treasury about this. because the U.S. Treasury is going to be concerned that if other companies or, you know, criminal organizations get a hold of that money, it's a lot of money. Yeah, it is. That, you know, that's a real issue. And you probably want to set up laws in some system in order to, you know, do that.

Yeah, because it's still very unregulated. There's so much crypto ledgers or. Yeah. And that's the problem is you have something very unregulated, which, people really like, but in some sense, that's the Achilles Hill. Yeah. That because it's unregulated, if some technology can overcome it. And so you may, you know, there may need to be some thought on how to, how to do.

Now, I'm not an expert here. But no, it's good to hear perspective. But I think I'm getting this kind of directionally correct. I talk to the people building what's next before it makes headlines. If that's useful to you, do not forget to subscribe to this channel. What is the timeline that you think? So what I like to say is it's possible in five to 10 years to build this a big enough quantum computer to do that. And partly I just say that that's kind of an optimistic scenario.

And partly I say that is to warn people that, you know, this may be coming and you want to protect, you know, every, not just Bitcoin, but, you know, the whole internet. needs to switch over in this kind of time period. Yeah. Now, what's interesting, and just I was at a meeting where the IBM kind of quoted similar numbers, this is all very reasonable. It's funny that at Google, the CEO is saying three to five years. Okay. Trying to push things.

Well, I think he's pushing because if you're a CEO and you're making a prediction, you want to have a lower number because you don't want to be caught. Yeah. You know, without that. But for example, Google already has quantum resistant protocols on at least some of their traffic. I don't know the details. But, you know, these big companies already know about it and are protecting their data

or will be protecting their data. Yeah. But there's things like crypto that, you know, that's beyond that and other kind of private systems that you might have to worry about. That was very interesting. So basically we're working in quantum computing, but then we'll also need to work on the algorithms that protect existing systems. Yeah, and what happened is actually the idea that you can break it, break it with this.

It was invented at the 1990s. People understood that. Well, Peter Shore and then, you know, in the early 1990s. And then the government, you know, really has understood this for a long time. And I'm going to say about 10, maybe 12 years ago, the government got very serious about. this and they saw that yeah okay the technology maybe you know could make this happen and for example at nist they have a big program that they're looking at what they called quantum safe cryptography other ways to encode it and that's that's been 10 years they have a nice algorithms uh people you know you can

download essentially the algorithm and code and people are are building systems to do this so So people have been responding to this well. You can buy solutions here. And, you know, so I think we're in pretty good state. I think people are still, you know, investigate. You know, part of the thing about the crypto security is people have to try to break it for a long time to make sure that it's really safe. I mean, people don't know that RSA is unbreakable. RSA for sure.

but they know from practice that, you know, and the way that everything's operating, that they don't think anyone is broken in. So it needs time to do this. You know, you're observing extremely rare events, and you're building something that is completely new. Has that changed how you think about luck, Black Swan moments, because you're observing them basically in your work?

What's kind of strange in my mind? career is I've been developing a series of experiments and how I've gone from, you know, one project to the other. And what's kind of funny in my career is I do a project and then somehow it doesn't work out in some way. And then I'm, you know, stuck wondering, well, I have to do something else. And then I figure out what else to do. That's really interesting. So changing all the different topics and projects has always come through some strange event, often kind of a negative event.

And just to give you an example, I went to Google. They paid me well. we did this quantum supremacy experiment. But then at some point after the quantum supremacy, they wanted to change the way they managed the group. And essentially, I was not Googly enough to stay at Google and I had to leave, which was kind of difficult to essentially leave a project you started way back in graduate school. However, by leaving Google, I was then free to feel. think very creatively and free to think, well, we're building in a certain way and how do I really want to build this to make it scalable and better and whatever? And by starting my own

company and thinking freely and, you know, starting it with the co-founders, we were able to come with a bunch of ideas how to make it better. And it could be that although that was a very, let's say traumatic thing. I'm sure other people have gone through this that may be the best thing for me and the field that I was able to do something new out of it. Absolutely. And so so you know, that's one thing. And this has happened to me over and over again. And you, I kind of have to accept that, you know, that's, you know, sometimes these setbacks in life are actually very good for you. So the good thing is this year I just kind of, I knew it was coming up, but I totally forgot about it. So when the phone call came, it was a complete surprise.

Is it like in the middle of the night? Middle of the night. Well, and it was, my wife was awake and she saw, she heard the phone ringing, but she thought she'd catch in the morning. And then she was just going to sleep and she looked at her email and there was all these congratulations. But that was like, you know, 2.30 in the morning. And she knows I need my sleep. So she didn't tell me until about 6 o'clock. You know, because I needed my sleep. And also there were reporters who were coming to that house, and they wanted to wake me up in bed.

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Plan your Scottish Escape today at Expedia.com slash visit Scotland. And she pushed them away, like, let him get his sleep. She said, no way, I'm we going to do that. But I do remember her, like, you know, sitting in the bed and, you know, waking me up gently and saying, hey, there's some reporters. And, you know, I kind of, I do, it's October. So I just opened my computer and I saw, you know, my picture there with John and Michelle. So that was a very, like, it's just, you can't believe that it's happening.

Sounds like a fairy tale. It's a fairy tale. And what I would say is I think the most interesting part is you get to go to things like this and have these very amazing experiences. Like lifetime? Here's what I actually walked away with. Morgan and Google aren't waiting for quantum to be ready. They are already deploying it. The race is happening whether your industry knows it or not. The encryption protecting everything

you do online, your bank, your company data, your messages, was built before quantum computers existed. John's timeline, 5 to 10 years. So that's not a distant problem. If you work in tech, finance, or cybersecurity, this is the conversation I think we should be having right now. In my newsletter this week, I mapped out which industries are most exposed right now and what people in those fields are actually doing about it. And how can you start adjusting your career for what's to come? My newsletter is called Future Proof. The link is in the description.

Quantum is 5 to 10 years out. AI is right now. I talked to a Stanford professor about exactly what to do in the next 30 days. That video is right here on the screen. It is very practical. It's going to make you excited about it. AI and excited about introducing it into your workflows. See you in that episode and thank you for watching this after the very end. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one.

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