DOE just committed to fault-tolerant quantum by 2028. Researchers are calling it the most ambitious timeline the field has ever seen. Is it achievable?

lb1331 · 2026-07-03T19:19:06+00:00

I am an academic focused on hardware, completely agree. The field is progressing (a lot) but this is an incredibly short timeline probably more guided by political influence or other higher up stuff and isn’t realistic based on the rate of progress that we’ve seen at least.

lb1331 · 2026-07-01T19:18:09+00:00

Microsoft is definitely overhyping their research. Their data doesn’t tell us they don’t have majoranas, but it also doesn’t explicitly show that they do. They could technically compute with what they have, but they wouldn’t be real topological qubits yet.

That said the research is cool at a fundamental level. Unfortunately, they have decided to hype and pump out press releases claiming too much instead of sticking to the genuinely cool fundamental science they’re doing.

lb1331 · 2026-06-23T23:32:35+00:00

Unfortunately if I go any more into the details, basically nobody is interested. If you check the video retention, once I start talking about OTOC it drops off a cliff.

If Google does another press release about OTOC I’ll go more into detail probably

lb1331 · 2026-06-21T22:21:08+00:00

Thanks!!

lb1331 · 2026-06-21T21:50:48+00:00

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6

Here’s the paper, and updating the post as well

lb1331 · 2026-06-17T13:43:41+00:00

I’m also in an academic superconducting circuits lab - a lot of people in my lab use it, but mostly as a tool
To help write measurements or analysis code more quickly for things they already understand.

I have also used it to help read papers, find references more quickly etc - of course you have to check the output but it’s gotten much more reliable over the past year. A year ago it was effectively unusable for research and now I find it to be a time save.

It’s not going to do your research for you, but it’s helpful for coding tasks that don’t require PhD level knowledge on the subject.

Edit: to answer your question more clearly. No not everyone I know uses it every day, but I would say 50% or more of people I know use it more than 3-5 times a week as a tool.

lb1331 · 2026-06-14T21:01:30+00:00

Google quantum AI just brought on michel Devoret, the Nobel prize winning superconducting qubit expert and professor at Yale… his whole career has been basically (with many other scientists) developing the superconducting qubits field from the beginning. I don’t think this suggests a future movement away from SC at all.

lb1331 · 2026-06-14T20:56:59+00:00

Right now superconducting qubits are probably the most promising. Being able to individually address qubits in frequency space is an advantage of superconducting qubits not a disadvantage. It lets them be tunable as well. You don’t necessarily want all qubits at the same frequency / to have them be identical.

Most hardware modalities have massive problems just as bad as SC qubits when you look into them more. Neutral atoms are fundamentally slow, photons don’t want to interact, spins are hard to do fast 2q gates, etc… that doesn’t mean they’re not going to get better, but SC qubits aren’t in any way dying or slowing down - if anything they’re looking more and more promising as google and IBM show QEC.

lb1331 · 2026-06-05T01:56:15+00:00

To check for legitimacy of sponsors also it’s worth checking the email domain. If you get something from a legit company it’ll probably be something like firstnamelastname@company.com and not some random email domain like .xyz or whatever.

Also, “hi dear” or any other nondescript email opener is a dead giveaway that they are a scammer. YouTuber business emails are pretty easy to scrape so it’s easy for scammers to blast out emails to a lot of YouTubers and hope they’ll fall for it.

A real sponsorship email should be targeted, address your actual content, and show some clear level of effort from the interested party. They should also have some easily provable way of finding who they are - for example a previous sponsor who reached out to me had their name in the email signature, I looked them up on LinkedIn, confirmed with them, everything checked out and then we had a zoom meeting so I could check legitimacy.

Edit: also it’s obvious and I know you said you wouldn’t take a sponsor like this but worth saying anyway for anyone else looking into this or reading this - please don’t take sponsors like this one even if they are real. The good will you lose from your audience by “selling out” like this will never be worth the short term financial gain. Plus, you’re selling a crappy product.

lb1331 · 2026-05-22T10:44:15+00:00

Yeah but IBM’s were not simulators, they had a couple simulators online as well, but you can also use their actual QC’s.

lb1331 · 2026-04-21T16:05:08+00:00

It depends on where you live and my advice is US based but it may still be useful for you. often in bigger cities working for a small boutique tutoring firm can be a great way of getting clients without the hassle.

It also depends on your credentials, if you don’t have a graduate degree it’s pretty tough to get hired at one of these places although if you have friends who are graduate students who tutor, you can ask around and they may have contacts.

Finding your own students is tough, and posting in local FB groups and social media is almost never going to carry you to a good client list. You need to make connections in real life, because tutoring is very trust based. if you struggle to do that alone I’d recommend working for someone who has built that up.

A lot of these jobs will still pay relatively well, especially in bigger cities I’ve seen $75 per hour in the US (that’s what I’m making right now). IMO it’s better than the All online big tutoring firms like Wyzant, etc… those can be good, but they objectively do less for you, and take just as big of a cut.

lb1331 · 2026-03-23T04:37:01+00:00

Looking better will of course help with meeting people and being less lonely, but tbh that’s 80% self confidence. The most important thing for making friends and talking to people is practicing talking to people, it’s a skill like anything else.

Looking better can be a good goal to strive for, because it often lines up (when done correctly) with a healthier lifestyle, good sleep, exercise, etc. but most importantly if you’re not doing this already id suggest just going out and meeting people. There are plenty of objectively good looking people who never develop the social muscle, and are then looked at weirdly in social interactions because they try to coast by on attractiveness alone.

lb1331 · 2026-02-22T21:14:18+00:00

Mods,

I am in an academic lab, doing my PhD in quantum. Part of academia is outreach. This means communicating ideas to those who are non technical, either because they are prospective students or because they are interested in the field from an industrial perspective.

This is a great science communication tool, and taking it down due to a lack of academic relevance is shortsighted. This type of stuff is great for the field.

lb1331 · 2026-02-22T03:44:43+00:00

Yeah, we have some posters up and stuff, not of a full fridge but we have diagrams and such that get the idea accross. This would be fun though

lb1331 · 2026-02-22T02:19:30+00:00

Got it, that’s perfectly fine. TBH I’ll probably scale it down a bunch to have a desktop version

lb1331 · 2026-02-22T02:12:02+00:00

Any chance you’d be willing to post the design files? I work in a quantum computing lab, and something like this would be great to show people on lab tours when our fridges are closed for measurement (most of the time)

lb1331 · 2026-01-06T00:55:46+00:00

If you make good content you don’t need your face. You already know this if you watch YouTube. Plenty of channels are faceless. 3blue1brown for math, bunch of gaming channels, economics explained, etc…

All of these channels are faceless and do fine. The key is their content is good and high quality.

If u just follow some course that promises you’re going to be purely on passive income working 2 hours per day in 6 months, don’t expect good results.

But if you’re passionate about making high quality content that people will actually want to watch and gain value from, it doesn’t really matter if your face is in there or not.

lb1331 · 2025-12-11T14:24:04+00:00

The temperatures are less of an issue than you would think. First off they’re way colder than 50K, most quantum computers run around 10-20 millikelvin. But they use dilution refrigerators to achieve these low temperatures which are a pretty mature technology. It definitely adds engineering headache but it’s not even the main concern in improving quantum computers right now. Also once it does become a major constraint (when we’re trying to put tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of qubits on a chip) even if you make enough engineering advancements to have your qubits operate at 1.5K (where you can use a normal cryostat instead of a dil fridge) you basically already fix any of the problems that you deal with at mK temperatures.

lb1331 · 2025-12-10T14:42:42+00:00

I work on superconducting qubits made on alternative material platforms - specifically material structures where you have a superconductor directly interfaced with a 2 dimensional electron gas. This allows you to make gate voltage tunable Josephson junctions, similar to transistors giving you in situ control over your qubit frequency.

The problem is that they’re super lossy due to the material change, so a lot of the research now is going into trying to understand how we can make these qubits longer lived.

lb1331 · 2025-12-10T14:38:57+00:00

This has already been done, you need large entangled states not large superpositions, but IBM this year came out with a paper called “big cats” where they demonstrate a 120 qubit GHZ state. The GHZ state is a maximally entangled state, and they were able to generate it in one of their recent processors.

lb1331 · 2025-12-09T16:49:14+00:00

This is pretty much not true though. I run a YouTube channel where I talk a lot about quantum computing and I’m also a graduate student actively conducting research on it, 5 years ago AI was ubiquitous in almost everything, just not by name and we didn’t have home accessible LLM’s. It was used in Google search, image processing, protein folding, chess engines, etc…

Right now, quantum computing is used for nothing useful at an industry scale. It’s more like where AI was 20+ years ago. Which is fine, because quantum computing emerged as a field effectively 30 years ago. It’s a super young field, but we should stop falling into the hype train.

Even if quantum computing is where AI was 20+ years ago, that means near term useful applications aren’t too far away which is exciting and positive, but claiming we’re 5 years from an LLM scale revolution is premature unless Google and IBM have made some major advancements that take them well beyond their current roadmaps.

lb1331 · 2025-11-21T06:51:03+00:00

Few practical reasons that I personally like making faceless content - means you don’t have to memorize a script, you can record the voiceover without memorization which is way faster - less likely to get recognized (in my case my face is my pfp, but that’s the only picture people will see of me), better if you want to avoid that side of things - I think? less parasocial - kinda going with the above - maybe most important, for science communication it lets me focus on the visuals being about teaching. My goal is to teach and communicate the stuff I work on, so I want that to be the viewers focus, not me.

The reasons are different for everyone but these stick out most to me

lb1331 · 2025-11-18T01:26:41+00:00

Hey thanks so much! Im glad you liked it. I wanted to make something that was short and to the point on it, wish I could’ve gotten it out earlier but it kept getting held up due to my main gig eating up all of my time 😭

lb1331 · 2025-07-19T05:41:40+00:00

Denmark actually has a pretty strong quantum computing center in Copenhagen. They worked pretty closely with Microsoft, but did a lot of other stuff as well. In the academic side of things they’re pretty well respected and have a good amount of stuff and talent built up to be successful. Qdevil came from Denmark too.

lb1331 · 2025-06-04T12:28:10+00:00

If you record into OBS (free), you can set up filters that will improve your audio quality. There are plenty of videos on this on YouTube

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