Niccolò de Masi, CEO and Chairman, IonQ | Leaders Talk

Quantum is coming at a doubly exponential rate, and that's going to really be like a freight train that is coming after anyone who's not positioned well. Humanity will relax when we see that economic growth can reignite, and we see that the computing is not only about disruption, it's about creation.

Wonderful to be here.

Well, I'm here to talk about resilience through quantum at the FII conference here in Rome. And I think there's a lot of questions, almost concerns, but certainly dreams and aspirations of resilience being something that is up and to the right for many nations, if not most nations in Europe. I believe that IonQ's ability to provide a complete quantum platform will enable broad-based economic growth. It will also help strategically important industries from material science to defense and intelligence to pharmaceuticals, logistics, financial services, you know, gain an edge on where the world is going and where the geopolitical and economic heft is moving in the coming years because quantum is very much now. We announced the last month and a half that the science, so to speak, phase of our company was done vis-a-vis quantum computing. We're now focused on engineering and manufacturing the next three generations of our fault-tolerant computers. We've demonstrated quantum advantage about half a dozen times in the past year off of older generations of our hardware. Those demonstrations have been in material science, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and training LLMs. And I feel this is just a tremendous inflection point and opportunity for Italy and Europe to have an outsized capture of the next big trend, not just in technology, but in computing and frankly the future of applied science.

The university talent pools are there. You know, I believe that IonQ is bringing a hardware platform that needs quantum algorithm research investment and talent to build businesses on top of it and really drive that broad-based economic growth. Economic growth implicitly almost automatically creates resilience because it reduces debt to GDP ratios. It provides obviously a broader base for frankly everyone. It raises GDP per capita disposable income. And so we're excited about the fact that the quantum revolution is probably just starting the way AI, GPU, classical machine learning did, you know, in 2020, 2021. You know, we have a few years to go before you see, you know, perhaps the same heft of revenue, but I remind myself that though we have a thousand times less revenue than Nvidia this year, Nvidia once had a thousand times less revenue than Nvidia, you know, last decade. And things change really quickly. And what I'm keen to impress upon European leaders, commercial and government at this conference, is that quantum is coming at a doubly exponential rate. So it's not like Moore's law where it doubles every two years and you can kind of decide if there's a cost-benefit analysis, opportunity cost, actual cost decision. With quantum, you know, you're going to get this tremendous double exponential increase in the number of logical qubits in our machines. And that's going to really be like a freight train that is coming after anyone who's not positioned well in investing in quantum workflows, in hybrid classical and quantum workflows, and really knows how to capture this power.

Well, I think it should put all of its focus into hybrid workflows that use GPUs and our QPUs, our quantum processing units. You know, the world today has classical input and output devices. Quantum's going to sit in the middle to solve these problems that otherwise might take a century or millennium for a classical GPU supercomputer to solve. We're going to turn those problems into something that happens in hours and days. And there's a lot of extremely valuable problems that we currently don't resource at all. Because if it takes a century, no one's going to put time, energy, money, and people against that. But when we turn those problems into something that can happen in hours, days, weeks, all of a sudden you have huge job growth that can transpire. And it's not just quantum computing that IonQ is bringing to Italy and Europe, it is quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum security. And by the way, everyone already needs quantum security. We're going to need it even more in a world where quantum computers can inevitably on a global basis, you know, crack RSA 2048 and run Shor's. We're here early because I believe that Italy can lead the EU in many ways if it decides to embrace this opportunity early, decides to produce a talent pool and a training pool in universities, decides to embrace on a broad basis across, you know, Italy's industrial base is quite powerful in places like defense, obviously, and the automotive industry and pharmaceuticals and material science. So there's a lot of great things to like about Italy as a potential, you know, quantum leader or the quantum leader. And we've opened an office in Rome because we believe that all the actions actually in Rome, and we believe that all of the political decisions and will, if you will, around grabbing hold of this opportunity are going to happen right here.

So, classical machine learning gets a bad rap right now because it's effectively doing to bank tellers, you know, with Excel [laughter] but on a broad basis, right? That's what's happening. People are automating away, you know, roles in some places. Quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, and quantum security are completely different. Quantum computing leaves humans in charge. We have to invent the algorithms for the machines to run. We have to instruct the machines to run them just like computing 5 years ago. And most importantly, quantum computing is focused on solving problems that are currently unsolvable using AI. And when if something's unsolvable, it means there's no resources, no people, no energy, no money applied against it. So, everything we're doing is tackling a problem that people believe is not worth hiring against. And it's creating jobs because all of a sudden, you can tackle these problems and you do want to resource this because it's economically useful.

Quantum computers use about 1/10... Our quantum computers use about 1/10 of the energy of a GPU to solve the kinds of problems we're good at. You know, we are not in the banner ad business. We're not trying to serve correlations, you know, in microsecond latency. We're in the applied science and turning unsolvable problems into solvable problems. So, the next leg up in the computer revolution after CPUs, GPUs, it's QPUs. I think you're going to see, you know, positive tailwinds not just because everything IonQ does creates jobs, but because it saves energy, ultimately will save on cost, and best of all, we leave humans in charge as opposed to disrupting jobs and leaving people wondering if quantum computers are hallucinating. We don't hallucinate. You know, ironically, even though we use what's called entanglement and superposition to look at a problem in parallel, the outcome is deterministic and humans are telling the machine to run an algorithm that we design. So it's kind of good old-fashioned computing just way more powerful. And giving us the ability to back solve for materials and drugs that we want and the properties we want of those.