Quantum Computers Aren't Useless. Here's How to Use One.

My friend Sabina Hassenfelder 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 2. 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. A startup called Oratomic says that they can break RSA encryption with just 26,000 qubits in about 10 days using neutral NMRAs, not the superconducting qubits I'm using in my lab, which are the same that Google and IBM are using. 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 millikelvin, just a whisper above absolute zero and far colder than even the CMB, which is what I study, at a balmy three kelvin. Now, a third paper by another group showed 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 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 1200 bits, or baud. 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 foobar just to navigate a 24-row monitor. That agonizing lag is the perfect analogy for quantum computing five years ago, where you waited in a queue for a noisy 20-qubit 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 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 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 goalposts dramatically for this goal. And we used to think about this as requiring systems that took millions of qubits, and 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 published breakthroughs, she's not wrong. And see above, as I said, quantum computers are awesome, unrivaled at simulating how quantum computers work. But Sabina's looking perhaps at the wrong metric. The revolution isn't in the papers, it's in the tooling. Five years ago, if you wanted to run a quantum circuit, you needed to access IBM's cloud. You'd wait in a huge long queue, you'd get a noisy result on maybe 20 qubits, even if you could figure out how to use it, and you'd 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 qubits, 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 Rings 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 for multiple hardware vendors around the world. The same code, different machines. Imagine how cool this is, 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 qubit optimization algorithm. Cora takes you through single qubit gates, entanglement, grover search algorithm, quantum Fourier transforms, Shor's factoring algorithm, which is literally the algorithm behind the code breaking news that Sabina broke, teaches you about noise and error mitigation, the real bugaboos that may be standing 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 e to 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 101 turned complex theories into pure curiosity basically and made me enjoy every second of it. The thing that surprised me the most about the quantum 101 course was knowing that qubits can be stored across a wide variety of media such as neutral atoms, artificial atoms through superconducting qubits and photons. It's really just mind-blowing to think of. Just thinking back on the complex theory we studied in our quantum physics classes, I thought it would be much more difficult to. I saw you run my first quantum algorithm 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 qubit. 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 Shor's 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. And I've worked with Bob and he's graciously given me a lot of his time and free access to the quantum rings software and 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 plot. 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 5 to 10 years on your classical computers. Way slower, albeit, 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 OpenQuantum which you can find at openquantum.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. Shor'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 code breaking. It's that we haven't had enough people at 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 our personal computer is good for, like the Apple II 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 Preskill at Caltech. Watch that here. And don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. See you next time on interview impossible.