The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology

Michelle Simmons is the founder and CEO of Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) and a Scientia Professor at UNSW Sydney. She is one of the few people in the field who has simultaneously run a 200-person academic research centre, founded Australia's first vertically integrated quantum computing company, shaped how the community publishes its results (as inaugural editor-in-chief of npj Quantum Information), and influenced national quantum policy. That combination of roles gives her an unusually grounded view of what is actually hard — in the physics, in the manufacturing, and in the business.

The conversation is happening at a specific inflection point. SQC published two landmark Nature papers within ten weeks of each other in late 2025 and early 2026 — an 11-qubit silicon processor with two-qubit gate fidelities reaching 99.99%, and a 15,000-site analogue simulator demonstrating a metal-insulator transition. The company has advanced to Stage B of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program whose stated opening position is skepticism that fault-tolerant quantum computing is achievable by 2033. And SQC is now shipping an analog quantum AI chip to commercial customers. This episode is for anyone who wants to understand what silicon spin qubits actually are, why the donor-qubit approach is architecturally distinct from the CMOS-foundry approaches most competitors use, and what a credible long-range quantum roadmap looks like when it is grounded in manufacturing reality rather than theoretical aspiration.

What We Get Into

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

Papers & Results

DARPA Program

Context & Analysis

Key Quotes & Insights

"Nature's perfect qubit." Simmons's phrase for the phosphorus donor atom in silicon: the qubit state forms naturally when the atom is placed, without complex materials engineering, in an environment where the silicon matrix acts as the vacuum does for trapped ions.

"Every atom counts." SQC's company motto, and a literal description of their manufacturing philosophy — because they know the position and behavior of every atom in every device, every chip is a learning opportunity.

> "I've never really seen...

Corey Stambaugh is one of the few people in the quantum world who has worked at the bench, inside federal policy, and now as the operational lead of a major public-private ecosystem initiative. He came up as a precision measurement physicist at NIST, moved to the White House's National Quantum Coordination Office as a senior policy advisor, and now directs the Capital of Quantum — Maryland's statewide effort to translate decades of university research into a commercial quantum industry cluster anchored in the Discovery District at the University of Maryland.

This conversation was recorded at the close of the 2026 Quantum World Congress, a week in which Maryland opened the Microsoft Quantum Research Center, announced Riverlane's U.S. headquarters in the Discovery District, welcomed QuEra Computing into the building, and unveiled a new partnership with Paladin Capital Group. If you follow quantum economic development, workforce policy, or the question of which regions are actually building durable quantum infrastructure versus generating press releases, this episode gives you a rare inside view from someone threading all of it together.

What We Get Into

• How the Capital of Quantum actually came together — the decades of university research that preceded the January 2025 launch, and what it took to stand up a formal initiative on top of that foundation
• What "150,000 square feet and a fridge at 14 millikelvin" means in practice — the Discovery Center build-out, from Microsoft buying the building to pumping down their dilution refrigerator in under a year
• Why the tenant list spans almost every major hardware modality — IQM (superconducting), Quantum Motion (silicon CMOS), Microsoft (topological), IonQ (trapped ion), QuEra (neutral atom), and Riverlane (error correction software) are all in or adjacent to the same building, and whether that's strategy or circumstance
• The DARPA Capital Quantum Benchmarking Hub — Maryland is one of three states with a memorandum of agreement under DARPA's QBI program, and what that independent benchmarking infrastructure means for an ecosystem that also hosts the companies being evaluated
• Quantum sensing as the near-term economic story — why Stambaugh, a metrologist by training, sees sensing startups like Euclid (NV diamond magnetometers for semiconductor inspection) as having clearer market paths than computing or networking right now
• The Paladin Capital partnership and the DC venture gap — why the mid-Atlantic VC culture differs from the West Coast model and what the initiative is doing to change the capital formation picture
• Workforce development from Q12 to the makerspace — a classroom next to a working dilution refrigerator, high school students from across the street getting their first look at a cryostat, and the lineage from early NSF quantum education workshops to the UN International Year of Quantum
• How Stambaugh thinks about competing ecosystems — Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico — and why he frames them as complementary rather than adversarial, while still being clear about Maryland's competitive positioning

Resources & Links

Guest & Initiative

• Capital of Quantum — Official Site — Landing page with ecosystem overview, company roster, and initiative goals
• Capital of Quantum — About Page — Detailed breakdown of initiative assets including QLab, Quantum Startup Foundry, and DARPA Hub
• Corey Stambaugh — University of Maryland Innovation Gateway — Current institutional role and title
• Corey Stambaugh — Council on Competitiveness — Career arc from NIST physicist to OSTP policy advisor to Capital of Quantum Director

Key Announcements Referenced in This Episode

• Governor Moore — $1 Billion Capital of Quantum Initiative (May 2026) — Official press release on IonQ HQ expansion, state budget commitments, and initiative goals
• Governor Moore — Microsoft Discovery Center Ribbon-Cutting (Sept. 2026) — Announcement of the Microsoft Quantum Research Center opening and Riverlane U.S. HQ
• Nextgov/FCW — Maryland Governor Touts New Quantum Partnership with Paladin Capital (Sept. 2026) — Coverage of the Paladin Capital Group partnership announced during Quantum World Congress week
• DARPA — Capital Quantum Benchmarking Hub MOA (April 2025) — DARPA's official press release on the up-to-$100M matching agreement with Maryland under the QBI program
• Quantum Zeitgeist — QuEra Computing Expands to Maryland — Stambaugh quoted on QuEra's arrival and the neutral-atom platform joining the ecosystem
• Quantum Zeitgeist — Maryland Wins Riverlane's U.S. Headquarters (Sept. 2026) — Riverlane's decision to locate its U.S. HQ in the Discovery District
• Data Center Dynamics — IQM's U.S. Quantum Technology Center — IQM's April 2026 arrival in the Discovery District
• Capital of Quantum — Quantum Motion Welcome (June 2026) — U.K. silicon-qubit company establishing U.S. presence in the Discovery District

Background & Context

• Quantum Computing Report — The Geography of Quantum: What Maryland Is Actually Building — Timeline of Capital of Quantum milestones from January 2025 through September 2026; useful for understanding the pace of the initiative
• Maryland Today — Quantum Discovery Center Launch — UMD's own coverage of the 2026 Quantum World Congress and Discovery Center opening
• The Baltimore Banner — Is Maryland's Big Bet on Quantum Computing Paying Off? (Sept. 2026) — A more critical look at Maryland's quantum ambitions; useful counterpoint to the official narrative
• YouTube — Corey Stambaugh at Q2B25 Silicon Valley — Stambaugh's January 2026 talk on the Capital of Quantum Initiative; good primer before or after this episode

Key Quotes & Insights

"Tell me where a national lab is, I'll tell you where a physicist is, and I'll tell you where quantum is." — Stambaugh on why quantum clusters form where they do, and why the lineage from NIST, Sandia, and Argonne to today's startups is not accidental.

"We ...

Isabella Martinez sits at an unusual intersection in the quantum ecosystem: she's not primarily a hardware researcher or an algorithm theorist, but a practitioner who has to make quantum work in operational environments — for customers who have real missions, real constraints, and very little patience for technology that can't be deployed. Her team at Booz Allen spans quantum computing, quantum sensing, and post-quantum cryptography, which means she's watching all three of the field's major near-term vectors simultaneously.

This conversation was recorded at Quantum World Congress 2026, and it reflects the mood of that moment: sensing is on the cusp of real deployment, PQC migration is being driven by policy urgency, and quantum computing is still asking the question of when — but the "when" is getting more specific. If you work in quantum and care about how the technology actually crosses the gap from lab to mission, this episode is for you. It's also a genuinely useful listen for anyone thinking about quantum careers, workforce development, or how to build teams that can navigate a technology that doesn't yet have a playbook.

What We Get Into

• Why Isabella's biomedical engineering capstone — not a physics class — shaped her entire approach to quantum: The lesson wasn't about building a better device; it was about why a life-saving tool sat unused because no one had time to get trained on it.
• The four-stage commercialization arc she uses to frame quantum maturity: Solve for physics, then engineering, then business case, then operationalization — and why that last step is the one the field talks about least.
• What quantum sensing deployment actually looks like right now: Including a vivid example of a quantum PNT sensor that "can't get wet" and what happens when you try to put it in a waterproof box without destroying its precision advantage.
• Why quantum sensing and quantum computing will diverge in their adoption paths: A drone operator doesn't need to know their navigation data is quantum-derived. A quantum computing user, at least for now, probably does — and that changes everything about how you design for adoption.
• How Booz Allen's team discovered the wrong part of a drug discovery workflow was being targeted for quantum speedup: A computational biologist and chemist sat down with the physics team and revealed that the step everyone assumed was the bottleneck wasn't the bottleneck at all.
• Why Isabella actively recruits people with criminology degrees, economics backgrounds, and education startup experience onto a quantum team: And why she's more worried about the rise of pure quantum-only graduate programs than she is about the talent shortage.
• The AI parallel that's shaping how enterprise customers think about quantum timing: Customers who watched AI capabilities leap unexpectedly are now asking "when" instead of "what" — but they're also more willing to wait for the right moment rather than jump in early.
• Her honest read on NISQ-era value: Real scientific output is happening on today's devices, but the early 2030s are where she expects the first commercially meaningful fault-tolerant results to appear.
• What the quantum community risks losing as the field matures: The collaborative, cross-disciplinary spirit that has defined the early era — and why she thinks that spirit is actually a competitive asset worth protecting.

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Isabella Bello Martinez — InformationWeek Author Page — Bio and links to her published articles on quantum talent and PQC for enterprise audiences.
• Booz Allen Quantum Sciences & Technologies Capability Sheet — Overview of Booz Allen's quantum practice, where Isabella leads products and partnerships.

Articles by Isabella Martinez

• "5 Steps for Implementing the New Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards" — InformationWeek — Her practical framework for organizational PQC migration, including the cryptographic inventory problem discussed in this episode.
• "Leading in the Race for Quantum Talent" — InformationWeek — Her argument for building quantum literacy at every organizational level, not just hiring PhDs — a theme central to this conversation.
• "Can Quantum Supercharge AI?" — Velocity by Booz Allen — Co-authored piece on quantum machine learning applications in defense, health, and intelligence missions.

Context & Policy

• "Post-Quantum Cryptography, Explained" — Booz Allen Hamilton — Booz Allen explainer co-authored by Isabella's team; useful background on the PQC migration landscape she references.
• NIST NCCoE — PQC Migration FAQ — Authoritative federal policy context, including algorithm finalization and binding federal deadlines.
• "Booz Allen Wins Air Force Quantum Research Contract" — ExecutiveBiz — The $25.3M AFRL contract for quantum R&D through 2031 that frames Booz Allen's current federal quantum posture.
• "Booz Allen Backs the Search for Quantum's Next Breakout Company" — The Quantum Insider — Booz Allen as presenting sponsor of the QWC 2026 Startup Pitch Competition, the event where this conversation was recorded.

Key Quotes & Insights

> "The problem wasn't actually an engineering problem. An engineering tool existed for the problem they were having us solve. The problem was that getting certified to use that tool took so long that most nurses didn't have the time to get trained on it."

— Isabella on the capstone project that shaped her entire career philosophy: adoption is often a harder problem than invention.

> "First you have to solve for physics, then you have to solve for engineering, and then you have to solve for business case. But I would argue then you have to solve for operationalizing something — which is even beyond them."

— On the four-stage arc that the quantum field's commercialization narrative tends to stop one step too early.

Insight: When Booz Allen sat a computational biologist and chemist down with their quantum algorithm team to walk through an actual drug discovery workflow, the team discovered that the step they'd assumed was the computational bottleneck wasn't the bottleneck at all. The right use case only became visible when the domain experts were in the room.

> "I need to do this purposefully. I have to purposefully open reqs where we are looking for people with more than just a physics degree."

— On why interdisciplinary hiring is a deliberate strategy, not a nice-to-have.

Insight: Isabella draws a direct parallel between the rise ...

Dr. Shintaro Sato is a Fellow and Head of the Quantum Laboratory at Fujitsu Research, and Deputy Director of the RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Centre. He oversees Fujitsu's entire quantum effort — from device fabrication through error correction architecture, software, and application research — and has been building toward commercial quantum systems since Fujitsu began its serious quantum R&D push around 2020. With over 164 publications spanning graphene nanoelectronics, superconducting qubit design, and fault-tolerant architectures, he brings both deep technical credibility and a rare full-stack perspective.

This conversation is timely because two significant developments converged almost simultaneously just before recording: Fujitsu announced a tin-vacancy (SnV) diamond-spin prototype developed with TU Delft and QuTech, and began testing its STAR error-correction architecture on neutral-atom hardware with startup Yaqumo — an explicit signal that Fujitsu is betting on hardware-agnostic software layers even as it races to scale its own superconducting devices. Listeners who follow quantum hardware roadmaps, fault-tolerant computing, or Japan's national quantum strategy will find this episode unusually specific and candid.

What We Get Into

• How Fujitsu actually fabricates its superconducting chips — Sato explains how the team adapted Nakamura-sensei's original RIKEN designs, developed their own Josephson junction uniformity techniques, and built a research fab capability from scratch rather than licensing finished devices.
• Why packaging is the hardest problem at 1,000+ qubits — not the qubits themselves, but the superconducting wiring, chip-to-chip interconnects, interposers, and the sheer number of control lines running from room temperature to millikelvin. Sato is candid that his engineers "don't want to do it anymore."
• What STAR architecture actually does — it's not a new error-correction code; it operates at the logical gate layer above the surface code, replacing the notoriously expensive T gate with phase-rotation gates and selectively reintroducing T gates only when rotation angles would otherwise accumulate too much error. Version 3 achieves roughly a 10x accuracy improvement over version 2 for the same physical qubit count.
• Why STAR is hardware-agnostic — because it operates at the logical operation layer rather than the physical error-correction layer, it can in principle run on any hardware modality. Fujitsu has now begun testing it on Yaqumo's neutral-atom platform, and Sato mentions QuEra has also demonstrated STAR independently.
• What tin-vacancy (SnV) diamond-spin qubits are actually for — not a replacement for superconducting qubits, but a photonic interconnect technology. SnV centers emit photons that can carry quantum information between modules, potentially linking separate dilution refrigerators — a transduction approach that sidesteps one of the hardest problems in scaling superconducting systems.
• The speed mismatch problem in hybrid architectures — superconducting qubits operate at gigahertz speeds; nuclear spins in diamond-spin systems operate at kilohertz. Sato acknowledges this directly and frames it as an architectural challenge analogous to CPU-memory hierarchies in classical computing.
• What Fujitsu's open-source strategy looks like in practice — the collaboration with Osaka University on Project Octopus, which produced an open-source full-stack control and software platform, is now being adopted as part of Fujitsu's commercial offering.
• What 2030 actually looks like — Sato is measured: a 10,000-qubit machine will still be a "very small scale logical quantum computer," most useful for quantum chemistry in hybrid HPC+quantum workflows. Revolutionary applications will come incrementally, not all at once.
• The long-term vision — Sato's stated dream is a quantum computer small enough to fit in a smartphone, which he acknowledges requires entirely different physics than anything on today's roadmap.

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Dr. Shintaro Sato — Fujitsu Quantum Day Profile — Fujitsu's own bio page covering Sato's dual role at Fujitsu Research and RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Centre.
• Shintaro Sato — ResearchGate Profile — Full publication list (164 papers, 3,096 citations); useful for tracing his path from graphene nanoelectronics to quantum architecture.
• Interview with Shintaro Sato — QuTech — Sato discusses the NV-center and diamond-spin collaboration with QuTech and the vision for quantum-as-a-service.

Hardware Roadmap & STAR Architecture

• Fujitsu Quantum Day 2026 — Sato Presentation Slides (PDF) — Primary-source slides showing the full hardware roadmap: 64 → 256 → 1,024 → 10,000+ qubits with STAR architecture milestones.
• Fujitsu Officially Starts 10,000+ Qubit Development — Fujitsu Press Release (Aug 2025) — Official announcement of the early-FTQC 10,000-qubit program targeting FY2030.
• STAR Architecture Overview — Fujitsu Global — Technical explainer for STAR ver. 3 (announced March 2026), including the qubit-reduction claims for ruthenium-catalyst calculations.
• How Fujitsu Is Tackling a 10,000-Qubit Quantum Computer — The Quantum Insider (Dec 2025) — Deep-dive on STAR architecture and the 250-logical-qubit target.

Diamond-Spin & SnV Prototype

• Fujitsu Develops Diamond-Spin Quantum Computer Prototype — The Quantum Insider (Sept 2026) — Announcement of the SnV-center diamond-spin QPU prototype from the Fujitsu/TU Delft/QuTech collaboration.
• Fujitsu Diamond-Spin SnV Prototype Analysis — Quantum Computing Report (Sept 2026) — Technical breakdown of SnV center advantages, photon emission characteristics, and hybrid roadmap context.
• Fujitsu and QuTech Realize High-Precision Quantum Gates — Fujitsu Press Release (Mar 2025) — NV-center two-qubit gate fidelity result (<0.1% error) published in Physical Review Applied; the technical foundation for the SnV work discussed in this episode.

Neutral-Atom / Yaqumo Collaboration

• Fujitsu and Yaqumo Begin Testing on Neutral-Atom Hardware — The Quantum Insider (Sept 2026) — Breaking news on STAR validation on Yaqumo's neutral-atom processors, announced just before this recording.

Marie Lepske brings a combination that's genuinely rare in venture: a background in applied mathematics and physics, early experience covering quantum at Runa Capital before most generalist funds knew the field existed, and now a GP seat at Constructor Capital, which closed a $110M Fund I in February 2026 with more than half its capital directed toward next-generation computing including quantum. She backed Qnami at Runa — a quantum sensing company acquired by Quantum Design in June 2026, one of the few clean sensing exits the field has produced — and Constructor's portfolio includes QuEra, which raised over $230M in a round led by Google Quantum AI and SoftBank.

The conversation matters now because the quantum investment landscape is genuinely changing. SPAC activity, mega-rounds from hyperscalers, and rising valuations are pulling in non-specialist capital at the same time that the science is getting harder to evaluate from the outside. Lepske is one of the people who has to navigate that tension every day, and she's willing to name the failure modes.

Founders building quantum or deep-tech companies, investors trying to understand where specialist and generalist capital intersect, and technically curious listeners who want to understand how the business side of quantum actually works will all find this episode useful.

What We Get Into

• Why technical training matters at the earliest stages — and what it actually buys you when a founding team's only asset is a laboratory and an optical table, before there's even a legal entity
• How the specialist-versus-generalist divide is evolving — Lepske's 2022 argument that early-stage quantum would stay specialist territory, and how she reads the arrival of Google, SoftBank, and NVIDIA in QuEra's cap table
• The due diligence framework for pre-product science startups — team provenance, patent landscape, IP legal review, and how Constructor uses its scientific advisory board to validate founders they can't fully assess internally
• What a "no" looks like — the specific signals that make Constructor wait rather than invest, including teams with strong science but no credible path to market and IP positions that are already crowded
• The Qnami exit and what it reveals about quantum sensing — why sensing applications are currently concentrated in R&D markets, which verticals Lepske thinks will break out first, and why sensing competes with computing for buyer attention
• The SPAC problem — why the wave of quantum public listings concerns her, and why evaluating roadmap credibility requires the kind of deep familiarity that takes years to build
• How Constructor supports portfolio companies beyond capital — executive hiring, software development guidance, co-investor introductions, and the limits of that hands-on model
• AI and quantum as parallel tracks — why she doesn't see AI as cannibalizing quantum talent or capital, and where she thinks the two fields will eventually converge

Resources & Links

Guest & Fund

• Marie Lepske — LinkedIn — Primary professional profile; includes keynote highlights and 2026 speaking engagements
• Constructor Capital — Official Website — Fund homepage with portfolio listings, team bios, and investment thesis across DeepTech, Software Tech, and Knowledge Tech
• Constructor Capital Fund I Close (Tech.eu, Feb 2026) — Coverage of the $110M close, check sizes ($1–10M, select up to $15M), and the university sourcing network

Portfolio Companies Referenced

• QuEra — $230M+ Financing Round Announcement — The round led by Google Quantum AI and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with NVIDIA's NVentures participating
• Qnami Acquisition by Quantum Design (The Quantum Insider, June 2026) — The sensing exit discussed in the episode; context on what a quantum sensing acquisition looks like

Background Reading

• Quantum Computing Report — "Venture Capital Trends in Quantum Technologies" (Runa Capital, 2022) — Lepske's co-authored market analysis, the source of her "specialist VC" thesis discussed in the episode
• Constructor Capital — "Quantum Investing Playbook" (Nov 2025) — Her Paris keynote on making successful quantum investments; source of the valuation figures cited in the conversation
• Entangled Future — Quantum Computing Funding & Investment Landscape 2026 — Context on the $4.9B private VC figure for 2025 and the broader public commitment landscape

Recent Constructor News

• Constructor Start Demo Day Finalists (The Quantum Insider, Sept 2026) — Quantum startups among the 16 finalists announced one week before this recording

Key Quotes & Insights

On what early-stage diligence actually looks like: > "They have only laboratory, and they have optical table which they want to show to you and you should understand if they have some interesting and useful patents or they can file them during the next one to two years."

On where specialist and generalist capital divide: > "These bigger players, they're coming later. They're coming when we already investigated that this particular technology and this particular team actually could win."

On the SPAC problem: > "It's very difficult for [non-specialist investors] to evaluate if they're doing proper investment or not, or if this valuation is good or not… You should be able to find out these roadmaps and to understand if this is a real roadmap or just written for the SPAC."

Insight — sensing vs. computing for buyer attention: Lepske observes that quantum sensing is structurally underappreciated relative to computing, not because the products aren't real, but because governments and corporates perceive computing as the larger prize — which she suggests is not obviously correct.

Insight — quantum talent scarcity as a leading indicator: She notes that quantum computing companies are now competing for talent the way AI companies did four or five years ago, with roughly 400–450 relevant laboratories globally — a number that puts the field's scale in sharp relief.

Related Episodes

• Ep. 22 — Trapped Ions and Quantum VCs with Chiara Decaroli — Another physicist-turned-investor conversation; useful companion for understanding how scientific training shapes investment judgment in quantum hardware
• Ep. 96 —

Tim Palmer is not a quantum computing skeptic from the outside. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a CBE, an IPCC lead author, and the inventor of probabilistic ensemble forecasting — techniques now used in every major weather prediction center on Earth. He did his PhD in general relativity under Roger Penrose. When someone with that profile publishes a peer-reviewed paper in PNAS arguing that the entire fault-tolerant quantum computing roadmap may rest on a mathematical assumption that is subtly and profoundly wrong, it is worth paying close attention.

The timing matters. The quantum computing industry is spending billions on the assumption that standard quantum mechanics scales indefinitely — that if you can build enough error-corrected qubits, Shor's algorithm will eventually factor RSA-2048. Palmer's RaQM framework, reviewed by leading quantum foundations researchers including Lucien Hardy and Nicolas Gisin, makes a concrete, falsifiable prediction that this assumption will fail somewhere between 200 and 1,000 error-corrected qubits. That falsification window is opening right now. This episode is for anyone who cares about the foundations of quantum mechanics, the long-term viability of fault-tolerant quantum computing, or the rare pleasure of watching a serious scientist put a real stake in the ground.

What We Get Into

Resources & Links

Guest

Papers & Articles

Further Reading

Key Quotes & Insights

> "It's not that nature ...

Daniel Loss is RDIA Chair Professor of Quantum Computing and Director of the Quantum Center at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia, where this work was done. He is also one of the most influential theorists in quantum computing. The 1997 Loss-DiVincenzo proposal — that electron spins in quantum dots could serve as qubits — now has more than 9,000 citations and is the conceptual foundation for the semiconductor spin-qubit platforms that Intel, HRL, Diraq, and a wave of European startups are actively building toward. In 2025, Loss was named a Clarivate Citation Laureate in Physics, a designation with a strong historical track record as a Nobel Prize predictor.

The reason to listen now is that Loss has turned his attention to a question that predates quantum computing itself: can reversible, energy-efficient classical logic be physically realized? His 2026 paper argues that the spin-qubit hardware the field has spent decades developing is, almost incidentally, the ideal platform to do exactly that — and that the energy advantage over room-temperature CMOS could be so large it would matter enormously for AI inference workloads and data-center power budgets. This episode is for anyone following the spin-qubit roadmap, the energy crisis in classical computing, or the deeper question of what semiconductor quantum hardware is ultimately good for.

What We Get Into

Resources & Links

Guest & Lab

Papers & Articles

Organizations

Key Quotes & Insights

> "If the physical platform is successful, we are guaranteed to have killer applications — because I don't need to find new algorithms for this." > — Loss on why classical reversible computing de-risks the spin-qubit investment, regardless of the timeline for fault-tolerant quantum algorithms.

> "The energy difference is a factor of ten to the fifth. And this is mind-blowing." > — Loss summarizing the device-level energy advantage of a spin-qubit Toffoli gate over its CMOS equivalent, after accounting for refrigeration overhead.

Insight: Loss argues that the Quantum Zeno effect — the tendency of frequent measurement to freeze a quantum state — can be used deliberately to stabilize classical spin states against relaxation, turning a well-known quantum-computing obstacle into a memory-stabilization tool for classical logic.

Insight: The proposal requires superposition only inside a gate operation, not between operations. This means the error-correction burden is classical (majority voting) rather than quantum (surface codes or similar), which is a qualit...

Román Orús is one of the rare physicists who built a foundational mathematical tool — tensor networks — and then watched it become the engine of a unicorn. His 2013 introduction to tensor networks has been cited over 2,000 times; his company, Multiverse Computing, just announced a $570 million Series C at a $1.7 billion pre-money valuation. That arc — from condensed matter theory to Europe's largest quantum software company — is worth understanding on its own terms. But what makes this conversation particularly timely is a May 2026 paper Orús co-authored demonstrating that individual layers of Meta's Llama 3.1 8B language model can be encoded as quantum circuits and executed on IBM's 156-qubit Quantum System Two while the model generates text. It's a proof of concept, not a product — but it's a real result, and Orús is honest about what it does and doesn't prove.

This episode is for listeners who want a technically grounded, hype-free account of the quantum-AI intersection: what tensor networks actually are, why they keep getting rediscovered across different fields, where classical simulation of quantum systems genuinely competes with quantum hardware, and what it looks like to build a company at the boundary between those two worlds.

Sponsor Message

The Capital of Quantum is a people story. Built on a top-five quantum PhD program  and 35-plus years of quantum research leadership. It's the billion-dollar initiative behind Discovery Center, launching this month with Microsoft, IQM, and Quantum Motion inside. That's why IonQ was born and is headquartered here, and why global companies keep choosing a spot minutes from Washington, D.C. This is where quantum is transforming the world. Come see it at the Quantum World Congress, September 23rd through 25th, College Park, Maryland. CapitalOfQuantum.com.

What We Get Into

• What tensor networks actually are — Orús explains the core idea without equations: tensors as the "DNA" of a quantum state, and how a network of them lets you see and quantify the internal correlations (entanglement) that matter versus the ones you can safely ignore.
• Why the same math keeps appearing in different fields — from condensed matter simulation to quantum computing simulation to machine learning, and why Orús sees that recurrence as a sign of something deep rather than a coincidence.
• How ChatGPT changed Multiverse's trajectory — the company was already applying tensor networks to machine learning before 2022; the emergence of large language models gave them a problem where the fit was obvious and the market was enormous.
• What "90–95% compression with minimal accuracy loss" actually means — Orús explains the overparameterization problem in current AI models and why he believes tensor networks address a genuine structural inefficiency, not just a tuning opportunity.
• The IBM kicked Ising model episode — Orús describes how his team rapidly produced a classical tensor network simulation of an experiment IBM had presented as evidence of quantum utility, and what that kind of competition between classical and quantum methods actually does for the field.
• The Cayley Unitary Adapter experiment — how Multiverse sliced individual layers out of Llama 3.1 8B, encoded them as quantum circuits, ran them on a 156-qubit IBM processor, and achieved a 1.4% perplexity improvement — and why Orús argues the improvement-per-parameter ratio is the number that matters, not the headline percentage.
• Why edge deployment is the real commercial driver — drones, satellites, vehicles, and industrial devices that cannot rely on cloud connectivity are the market pulling Multiverse toward smaller, more efficient models, not just benchmark competition with frontier labs.
• How Orús thinks about Multiverse's identity — he calls it a "quantum AI company," not a quantum company or an AI company, and explains what that distinction means for how they allocate research effort and where they expect to be when fault-tolerant quantum hardware matures.
• What he'd tell a PhD student today — a genuinely honest answer about the trade-offs between academic research and deep-tech industry, from someone who has lived both simultaneously.

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

• Román Orús — Personal Site — Lists talks, reviews, affiliations, and awards including the 2024 Physics, Innovation and Technology Prize from the Royal Spanish Society of Physics.
• Multiverse Computing — Official Website — Home page for CompactifAI, Singularity, and Multiverse's full product portfolio.

Papers & Articles Discussed in This Episode

• arXiv 2605.05914 — "Quantum-enhanced Large Language Models on Quantum Hardware via Cayley Unitary Adapters" (May 2026) — The paper at the center of the episode: Llama 3.1 8B layers running on IBM's 156-qubit Quantum System Two. Start here if you want the technical details behind the quantum-in-an-LLM result.
• Multiverse Computing — "Talking to a Quantum Computer" (May 2026) — The accessible blog-post version of the Cayley Unitary Adapter experiment; a good entry point before tackling the arXiv paper.
• arXiv 2401.14109 — CompactifAI: Extreme Compression of Large Language Models Using Quantum-Inspired Tensor Networks — The foundational peer-reviewed paper introducing Multiverse's tensor network compression method.
• arXiv 2509.06653 — "Classical Neural Networks on Quantum Devices via Tensor Network Disentanglers" (Sep 2025, rev. Apr 2026) — Orús, Singh, and Aizpurua on hybrid classical-quantum execution for bottleneck neural network layers; the research underpinning the longer-term hybrid architecture vision.

Models & Products

• HyperNova 60B on Hugging Face — Open-source 50%-compressed model derived from GPT-OSS-120B; context for Multiverse's open model strategy.
• Pulsar 16B Launch with NVIDIA (June 2026) — Announcement of Multiverse's open reasoning model, scoring 87.22 on AIME 2025 at 16B parameters.

Funding & Company Context

• Series C Announcement — GlobeNewswire (July 2026) — $570M / €500M round at $1.7B pre-money valuation; covers investor lineup and deployment verticals.

Key Quotes & Insights

> "We are using atomic bombs to kill a mosquito." Orús on the overparameterization of current large language models — and why he believes the transformer-attention paradigm, however successful, ...

Piotr Lewandowski is a software engineer based in Poland who, as a side project, has built something that no well-funded research institute has: a continuously updated, ontology-tagged intelligence platform that ingests the entire quant-ph archive, tracks thousands of open quantum roles across hundreds of companies, parses patents and grants and open-source repositories, and links all of it to individual researcher profiles. He is not a tenured academic or a hardware engineer. He is an independent data practitioner, and that outsider position gives him a vantage point on the quantum workforce that insiders rarely have — or rarely share.

This conversation matters now because the quantum industry is simultaneously claiming a generational workforce opportunity and struggling to fill highly specialized roles. Lewandowski's data offers a rare ground-truth check on both claims. If you work in quantum hiring, research, policy, or investment — or if you're a student trying to understand what the field actually looks like from the outside — this episode will give you a more honest picture than almost anything else currently available.

What We Get Into

• How qubitsok's 500-tag ontology was built from scratch — why Lewandowski chose a tree-structured, parent-child tag system rather than relying on existing academic metadata infrastructure, and how it steers AI toward the most specific and useful classification rather than broad category labels.
• What the full quant-ph corpus reveals about researcher mobility — which countries are gaining quantum talent (Germany and China are notable winners) and which are losing it (the US and Australia are among the top brain-drain sources), based on tracking affiliation changes over time in published papers.
• The rising share of industry authorship in quantum research — industry-affiliated authors have grown from roughly 3.4% of quant-ph papers in 2005 to nearly 14% in 2026, and what that structural shift might mean for what gets published — and what doesn't.
• Why the platform tracks open-source contributions alongside papers — when researchers join industry and their publication rate drops, their open-source activity becomes a meaningful proxy for continued technical engagement, and qubitsok indexes both.
• The "qubie" talent-matching tool Lewandowski is building — rather than keyword overlap, qubie dispatches sub-agents to extract specific, claim-level evidence from a researcher's papers, dissertations, and other public writing, then returns a structured profile and interview guide for each candidate.
• Why sourcing quantum talent is a fundamentally different problem than general tech recruiting — the evidence of what a quantum researcher can actually do is largely public and published, but no one has had the infrastructure to read it systematically at scale until now.
• The two product directions Lewandowski is weighing — analytics and competitive intelligence for investors and companies versus talent matching for quantum hiring — and why he's currently prioritizing the latter.
• What it means to build a field-level intelligence platform as an outsider — Lewandowski is neither employed by a quantum company nor affiliated with a university, and that independence shapes both what he can see and what he can say.

Resources & Links

Guest Links

• qubitsok.com — The platform itself: quantum job board, daily arXiv paper digest with semantic tagging, and researcher collaboration search. All free for researchers and job seekers.
• qubitsok.com/collaborate — Search for quantum researchers by expertise, ontology tag, and affiliation — useful for finding collaborators or co-authors.
• Piotr Lewandowski on LinkedIn — The best place to reach him directly, especially if you're a company interested in early access to the qubie talent-matching product.
• Piotr Lewandowski on YouTube — His channel covering quantum computing job market analysis and platform updates.

Papers & Reports

• EPJ Quantum Technology — "The quantum technology job market: data-driven analysis of 3,641 job posts" (March 2026) — Lewandowski's peer-reviewed paper on the quantum job market, the most rigorous published treatment of the data underlying qubitsok.
• 2026 Quantum Computing Salary Report — Analysis of 194 salary data points drawn from real job postings; a useful benchmark for researchers and hiring managers alike.
• Fastest-Growing Quantum Skills 2026 — Lewandowski's analysis of 1,212 quantum jobs and 14,975 papers identifying which technical skills are accelerating and which are declining in the labor market.

Tools & Platforms

• qubitsok.com/jobs — Live quantum job listings, filtered by the platform's 500-tag ontology.
• qubitsok.com/region/europe — Live European quantum jobs market data, useful context for the EU talent and salary discussion.
• qubitsok.com/hire — Information for companies looking to use qubitsok's candidate database and, soon, the qubie matching tool.

Recognition

• Dr. Bob Sutor's "Quantum Follow Friday" (February 27, 2026) — Sutor Group newsletter highlighting Lewandowski as a key quantum community voice worth following; useful context for his growing recognition as an independent analyst.

Key Quotes & Insights

On why the published record is a better hiring signal than a LinkedIn profile: > "Research gives you this unique lens to see people's work before you talk to them. You can be really prepared, and this helps on two sides — you talk to people actually capable of filling the role, and you're not wasting their time asking questions they already answered via their published work."

On what brain-drain data actually shows: > "The biggest country that gained quantum computing talent in the last twenty-four months is Germany — which is not something someone could expect. And the biggest countries getting brain-drained are, interestingly, the United States."

Insight — on the soul-crushing reality of quantum sourcing: Lewandowski's first job in college was sourcing — going through profiles with pen and paper, making cold calls that nobody wanted to receive. His argument is that quantum hiring doesn't have to work that way, because the evidence of what a researcher can do is already public. The problem has never been a lack of signal; it's been a lack of infrastructure to read it.

On the rising share of industry authorship: Industry-affiliated authors have grown from roughly 3.4% of quant-ph papers in 2005 to nearly 14% in 2026 — a structural shift in who is producing the science, with implications for what gets published and what gets quietly redirected into proprietary pipelines.

Insight — on the limits of the data: Lewandowski is consistently careful about w...

Richard Entrup is unusual in quantum circles: he's not a physicist, and he doesn't pretend to be. He spent decades as a CIO, CTO, CDO, and CISO at organizations including Verizon, Christie's, Tiffany & Company, MoMA, Disney/ABC, and Time Warner before joining KPMG to lead its Emerging Solutions practice. That background — deep operational experience on the client side — shapes everything about how he thinks about quantum. He's not selling a hardware roadmap; he's thinking about what it actually takes to get a large, complex organization to change its cryptographic infrastructure before a threat materializes.

The conversation matters now because the signals are accelerating. NIST has finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards, executive orders in the US are pushing federal agencies toward PQC migration, and the algorithmic efficiency gains that reduce the qubit threshold for breaking RSA-2048 keep coming. Listeners who work in enterprise technology, cybersecurity, or quantum strategy — or who advise organizations that do — will find Entrup's practitioner perspective a useful counterweight to the more hardware-focused conversations that dominate the field.

What We Get Into

• Why Q-Day's exact date is the wrong question — and why the more important issue is how long it will take enterprises to even inventory their cryptographic exposure, let alone remediate it
• The scale of the cryptographic migration problem, including why a single laptop may contain hundreds of individual cryptographic components and why upstream/downstream API dependencies make this a supply-chain-wide challenge, not just an internal IT project
• Why "harvest now, decrypt later" creates urgency today, regardless of when fault-tolerant quantum computers arrive — and how compliance and regulatory timelines interact with that threat model
• What crypto agility actually means in practice — moving from a "set it and forget it" cryptographic posture to a dynamic, continuously monitored framework, including the pressure SSL certificate renewal windows are already creating
• How KPMG built its PQC practice, incubated it within the firm, and handed it off to the cybersecurity advisory team as a core service offering
• The "good quantum" side of the ledger — how KPMG's emerging research function is approaching quantum computing as a source of competitive advantage, not just risk, and what sectors are furthest along in exploring it
• The AI-quantum convergence, including Entrup's observation that AI is already being used to read and crack code — and what that means for the urgency of cryptographic modernization
• Why the enterprise quantum opportunity still has a long tail, and how the current moment compares to the early infrastructure phase of the internet — when everyone was talking about TCP/IP and DNS, not Uber or Netflix

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Richard Entrup — Worth Magazine Profile — Career arc from CIO/CISO roles at major global brands to KPMG's Emerging Solutions practice
• KPMG Quantum Dawn (2025) — KPMG's enterprise quantum readiness hub, introducing the Q-PREP framework and PQC implementation services, with Entrup as named lead
• KPMG Quantum homepage

Reports & Research

• KPMG — "The Quantum Threat Is No Longer Theoretical" (2026) — The threat brief discussed in this episode, charting the rapid decline in qubits needed to crack RSA-2048 and urging immediate PQC migration
• KPMG — "From Theory to Impact: Real-World Results in Quantum Machine Learning" (2026) — KPMG's joint report with IBM and Kipu Quantum on measurable quantum ML results on real hardware
• KPMG — "Prepare Now for Quantum Cyber Risk" — Board Leadership Article (2026) — C-suite and board-level guidance on integrating quantum risk into enterprise oversight
• arXiv — "Quantum-enhanced satellite image classification" (2026) — The underlying research paper behind the KPMG/IBM/Kipu Quantum ML results

Ecosystem & Events

• Chicago Quantum Exchange — KPMG Joins CQE (October 2024) — Announcement of KPMG's formal CQE membership, referenced in the episode as part of the firm's ecosystem-building strategy
• KPMG 2026 Quantum Consortium — The inaugural KPMG Quantum Consortium event (March 2026, Orlando) discussed in the episode

Independent Coverage

• Quantum Computing Report — KPMG joins Chicago Quantum Exchange (2024) — Independent coverage of KPMG's CQE partnership and enterprise quantum strategy
• Quantum Zeitgeist — Kipu Quantum satellite imagery coverage (Feb 2026) — Independent analysis of the KPMG/IBM/Kipu hybrid QML results

Key Quotes & Insights

> "It's not if but when. And it could be five years, could be three years, could be ten years. The fact is organizations are not gonna be ready. And that's the scary part." — Richard Entrup on Q-Day

> "This is not just the CISO. This is gonna be the software engineering app dev guys. This is gonna be all your partners, upstream and downstream, who have to also be compliant — because if you change your crypto and they don't, that stuff's gonna break." — On why PQC migration is an enterprise-wide, supply-chain-wide problem

Insight: Entrup draws a sharp distinction between the "bad quantum" (cryptographic risk requiring urgent defensive action) and the "good quantum" (competitive opportunity with a longer tail) — and argues that most organizations aren't adequately addressing either.

Insight: The analogy to the early internet is deliberate: just as the 1990s were consumed with TCP/IP and DNS rather than the applications those protocols would eventually enable, the current quantum moment is still largely an infrastructure conversation — and that's normal, not a sign of failure.

> "AI is expediting all of this. If AI is doing one thing, the use case is reading code and cracking it. That's pretty scary." — On the intersection of AI capability and cryptographic vulnerability

Related Episodes

• Ep. 81 — Quantum LDPC Error Correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster — Directly relevant: Cohen and Webster discuss how QLDPC error correction reduces the qubit overhead needed for RSA cryptanalysis, the technical underpinning of the threat timeline Entrup describes
• Ep. 38 —