How AI Will Change Quantum Computing - Ep. 294

And this has been a huge missing part of the quantum computing community. Access to open AI models to really use the latest in AI technology to help us accelerate how we get to these useful quantum applications. Welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm Noah Kravitz. A quick note before we begin, you can now watch the AI podcast in full video. Check us out on the NVIDIA YouTube page. And of course, if you prefer the audio only feed, you can still get us wherever you get podcasts. Nick Harrigan is here. Nick is a product marketing manager for quantum computing at NVIDIA, and we're here to talk about the state of quantum computing, what AI means for quantum computing, and really all kinds of things that sound like science fiction until you hear Nick explain them. So Nick, thank you so much for joining the AI podcast. Glad to have you here. Thank you for having me. Excited to talk about it. So maybe we can start with the basics. Can you kind of give an overview for us of what quantum computing is and kind of the state of play of things right now? Yeah. Absolutely. So quantum computing is a new kind of way to build computing technology. So everything we have today in computers, which is incredible, what you can do with computing today, is fundamentally based on a transistor, a special kind of switch that can be zero or one. Quantum computing kind of asks, what if your switch was a quantum mechanical object? Something that obeys quantum laws of physics can do very strange things. And what if you rebuild how you compute based on that? And so if you do that, it turns out, if you can build such a device and you can integrate it into a supercomputer, you can start to solve problems with computing that we just wouldn't have even thought of as being addressable. They were just too hard or outside of the scope of computing. So it's really a new kind of technology that augments our existing kind of GPU supercomputers with whole new capabilities. And is it that and you're gonna have to correct me here as we go. But to kind of break it way down, is it that quantum allows for faster computation or more computations at once? Something different? How how does it work in that regard? Yeah. So in in some application areas, it might be that it can perform some things faster than a conventional computer can. But that really undersells the difference. In many cases, it's so much faster that the problems just were not tractable at all. It wasn't that, you know, today's technology was a bit slow. Mhmm. Maybe some future generation would be. In some cases, quantum computing can give us a kind of exponential or even, like, a very strong polynomial advantage over a normal computer. Meaning that as you make the problem you're trying …