SPEAKER_02 0:40

Hey Sifrien, how are you doing today? Hey Patrick, I'm doing good, looking forward for another great episode of Untangled Things.

SPEAKER_04 0:47

I don't know how it happens, but our guests keep getting better. So today we're joined by Yuping. You Ping, can you please introduce yourself to our audience?

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Hey, uh Patrick and Sypia and hey everybody. You Ping Huang here. I'm the uh CEO and uh the chairman of uh Quantum Computing Inc., a public company. But uh I'm really uh also a physics professor, so we're gonna have to be here and uh to share some of my thoughts and maybe to learn something from Patrick and see if he can't.

SPEAKER_04 1:21

Well, I mean, as a as a professor, you're in the right place at the right time. Quantum's exploding. There's so much buzz right now about things getting uh real. And you guys are are heavily involved, especially on the photonic side, which I just don't see a future where photonics doesn't play a role. Other modalities are interesting, and I'm sure they're gonna play a role. But but photonics seems the only way we're gonna connect this stuff together.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

You know what, Patrick, is uh I feel very pleased and honored to have heard what you said, because uh this has been what I have been trying to tell everybody that uh since uh over 15 years ago, that uh hey guys, look at photonics and uh photonics is in inherently quantum mechanical. Of course, uh there's some technology and engineering challenges to implement uh uh quantum tech in photonics platform, but uh over the past uh 10 years and we have seen lots of progress on both fronts, and now I think um the opportunity for photonics to make big buzz and to have a strong push on the quantum technology transport industry right here. So so I I I'm actually excited by the progress that we have been making at QCI and uh the progress that uh people are making uh in all different areas of photonics for quantum.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

The other thing that Patrick and I were discussing a lot and were mentioning a lot, photonics also seems to be the one and only bridge between quantum computing and quantum communications, which is probably kind of like the cornerstone of the future of the field, right? So I think that's another very important angle when we talk about photonics.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

This is this is a hundred percent uh correct. So the only way to connect quantum computers over distance is by photonics. And uh we have seen in the digital era that we have been in uh over the uh since uh um the late 90s that uh so the power of computing is really modified when you can connect many computers together. And uh I have no reason to believe that uh this is not true for quantum. In fact, uh so I believe that uh the quantum future really um hands on the success of quantum internet as well, where we connect many, many quantum devices uh by internet, and the only way to do it to the best of my knowledge as a physics professor is by photonics. So this is why um um that uh um processely as you just said that uh well since we are going to use photonics to connect uh uh quantum machines, quantum computers, the easiest way to make it happen is to use photonics to build quantum machines, to build quantum computers, so that uh you don't need to have this uh intermediate step of converting um the information carrier of um say from Adam uh to photonics or vice versa. But uh on the other hand, so I'm not saying that uh um uh we have to use uh photonics to build quantum computers. In fact, so I believe in the opposite. I believe that uh the quantum space is open, open not just in the technology approach, but also in this wide application space. I believe the future of quantum will consist of uh say those atom-based, uh superconductor-based, ion-based, and photonic-based quantum computers, and each of them will um take care of uh um some niche applications in its own areas where uh it makes most of sense in terms of the cost of operation, in terms of the speed to solution, for example.

SPEAKER_04 6:52

We've said that. We we've discussed the fact that there's we don't there there's no winning modality, that there's so many modalities, and we may have others to discover that we haven't seen. It seems like any binary property at the quantum level can be turned into a qubit if you if you engineer it right.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Indeed. Precisely. Patrick, uh do you have a physics PhD?

SPEAKER_04 7:18

I do not. No. I but I hang out with people like you way too often, so it's it ribs off.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Impressed. Yes, indeed. So in fact, uh any these great quantum state system can potentially turn into an information processing machine. And uh depending on what applications, it could be computer, right? It could be encoder, right? It could be sensor.

SPEAKER_04 7:49

Amazing. Uh I I do have one question that might might might veer on to the professor side versus the CEO side of your uh personality, which is we've we've seen some articles in the past that said there was a hypothesis that maybe instead of entangling uh instead of measuring and and entangling that that you might take, especially in photonics, entangle millions of photons and measure along the way. So as a way to basically, because it's it's the fragility of the state that's our biggest challenge. And so, like normally you you take and you you operate and then you entangle and then you measure. But but someone posited, and I didn't really get enough about the article, um, I didn't read the underlying paper, um, that maybe you could entangle a huge amount of photons at creation and have like this herd of them that you could measure some of them along the way to make sure you're going the right direction. Is that something that that QCI is looking at? Or are you more the old-fashioned way of like manipulating entangled states as you go? Let me answer your question. Uh and if that's an unfair question, I'm I'm happy to move on because it's a weird question.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

No, it is a a very good and a deep question. So I can tell you this. Um many physicists, including myself, have spent over 10 years trying to find a way to efficiently create entangled two photons. Just two. And it's already very hard. And the big issue there is the uh standard way for us to create entanglement so the process itself is uh render, is uh stochastic. Meaning that uh so you don't have much control of when the two entangled photons can be created. But uh say maybe on average um each each time you try uh you can you can say have uh uh uh say eight eight percent five percent probability of getting the entangled payout. This is actually an issue for using the photonics uh for quantum computing because uh just as you said, Patrick, for many applications you do need to prepare uh many many photons that are entangled. And uh now if you only have uh five or eight percent probability of uh to create uh one pair, so the probability of being able to get many many pair would be very very slim. So we don't like that. And uh I actually myself spent uh geez studying studying from 2010, so really looked into the fundamental physics uh first and the uh uh engineering aspect of how to make it happen. So in fact, we find a way to make it happen, although right now, so there are still some uh engineering challenge uh actually on the manufacturing side to make the device. But hey, so we find a way to allow you to determine deterministically create entangled photons so that uh when you say that give me one pair of entangled photons, you will get one pair.

SPEAKER_04 12:02

Yeah, we we assume it's that's a step that everybody simplifies. Since the first time we Ciprian and I started talking about, well, you entangle a couple things and then and we skip that. And so it's fascinating how how in-depth it is and how hard it we we don't take it, we take it for granted that it's it's not as hard.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

And uh and so now uh so this is actually what's uh what's happening now at QCI now. Uh for uh for that to happen for the deterministic generation of entangled photons, uh you will need to make very specific uh photonic integrated circuits with some crazy parameters for you to hit. And uh well, so uh since I proposed this approach, say I think uh there are a total of eight pretty crazy parameters for us to hit, and we have hit seven.

unknown 13:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

We are trying to hit the eighth one uh in the QSAI fab now. So I tell you what, so I feel good about it, but uh after have pushed this like for for for over 10 years, I'm kind of getting old, so I'm pushing my my engineers that okay guys, I told you the recipe, right? You can just make it happen and then come back.

SPEAKER_04 13:36

Oh I'll be I'll be on the beach. Just let me know when it's done.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

So so so so the real requirement is that uh so you will have to make this a very high quality, what we call micro ring optical cavity. And uh in order to get the Q, uh the Q factor of the cavity. Okay, guys, stop me if I started to talk too much into physics. Um, that's fine. We we like that. We needed to we needed to cut um some uh micron size bridge uh reach waveguide on uh uh thin few lithium niggas wafer with the surface roughness like less than 300 picometer. Wow. It it is crazy, right? Um but I can tell you that uh that that's what we have uh we have achieved last year, but this is just the first step, and there are multiple steps, and uh the team's working hard on that. While uh I I probably can find one one or two days uh to go to the beach, as Patrick just did. Um but but now getting back to your original question, Patrick, because you really are asked a astronomical question that can we entangle one million photons? I guess uh then after my long answer, the short answer is that yes in principle but yes in principle, but uh I don't see how in my lifetime, but fortunately we don't need that. We don't need it to entangle one million photons for us to build a quantum computer using photonics. As long as say we can make uh hundreds of thousands of uh pairs of entangled photons where two photons are entangled in each pair, so we can already build some very useful and very powerful quantum computers.

SPEAKER_04 16:24

That that makes perfect sense because I think the context of the entangle a million was the fact that there was so much loss in transmission. But you're you're talking about calculation as well, you're talking about gates. Yeah, and and um so you guys have built a universal quantum computer gate-based um with photonics.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Uh no, so we have walked on this and we figured out how to build, um, but uh so that this work is still ongoing. What we have now on shelf um uh for customers uh to buy as of now is a specialized uh quantum optimization machine that definitely utilizes quantum effects, but it is not gate-based.

SPEAKER_04 17:17

Um okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

And they are very good uh uh for solving a pretty uh large portfolio of optimization problems, uh but it is not a general-purpose quantum computers.

SPEAKER_04 17:35

Is that a goal down the line for you guys, or is that not an area that you're going into?

SPEAKER_01 17:40

We are working on building the gate-based uh uh quantum computers. Yes, so this is our goal. But um the approach that uh we are taking at QCI is that uh so we don't want to define uh what kind of quantum computers or what quantum computers should look like by ourselves. In fact, uh so we go to the customers, we talk with them and we understand what they really need. And we build quantum machines uh to meet their need. In fact, uh very interestingly, so while physicists, including myself, um were very fascinated on building the gate-based uh uh general purpose quantum computers, actually. So many customers uh they the the feedback that we got from them uh um um has been that uh uh so do you have a quantum machine that can solve my problems now? And what we find is that uh so for many of those problems, gate-based machine actually does not give us the edge, does not give us the advantage. It's that some specially uh special purposed machines can solve their problems. So this is how we get started with the quantum optimization machine. Cool.

SPEAKER_02 19:27

That's I think that's very interesting because one of the themes that that uh occurs quite a lot, and we discuss about it quite a lot, is the difficulty in essentially embedding real-world problems into the space of quantum, right? Defining a problem in a way that can actually be addressed, right, with a quantum device or a quantum computer or however we want to name it. And I think besides the specific task of building these devices, the theoretical problem of defining the problem in a way that's suitable, I think is is kind of the other big big goal here for everyone in the in the field.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

And uh do you know the fundamental reason for such difficulty for cus uh for people in in needs uh to formulate the problem to run on quantum computers? What is what is it? This is because in many cases, say quantum computers uh have been designed based on the understanding of scientists criticists. Right. So so it is that okay, so for example, just to use this gate-based. So so in fact, uh so there is no rule set that uh so we have to use the gate-based. It was that okay, so when we open a classical computer, right? So you will have the memory, right? You have the processor, and uh there that's a lot of transistors, right? So uh the easiest way to picture what uh a future quantum computer would look like is that okay, how about just uh we replace all the parts of a classical computer with a quanta equivalent and to it's what we know. Yes. If you wanted to build a new technology or build a new type of hardware uh by harnessing a totally different uh physics, right? So you're starting. point is should not be try to box the new physics into the old architecture. You should uh go deep into the new physics itself okay and then try to find the most logical way to build the hardware according to the physics itself.

SPEAKER_04 22:25

This is why in every sci-fi movie all the aliens look like humans. They just have different like nose ridges and things like that. It's it's the lack of imagination is what you're getting at.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Yes and uh and actually so I but that um um actually so I have been I mean I had uh uh been struggled uh in in the same puzzle and but then um um since uh about 10 years ago I started to tell myself that okay let's uh really try to uh let quantum be quantum and uh try to make friends with quantum instead of trying to box the quantum in a classical architecture so let's build uh a quantum machine that uh um observe the unique property of quantum physics itself and it's and then see how we can leverage it. How can we can leverage it. So this is why we are building some quantum machines at QCI that is very different from what anybody has done. But hey so it works and uh uh we have find that uh so they can indeed solve um problems very efficiently and uh give us better solutions and uh I in fact so when we first announced this uh machine many people said oh this is not a quantum computer because in people's mind it is that for a quantum computer you have to have the gate base you have to have the quantum memory and we are doing something very different but my definition of a quantum computer is that a machine that utilized the quantum effects to solve problems with advantage that is unmatched by any classical and that's working for you because you guys just announced um uh an AI edge product I believe didn't you yes uh this is a another uh pretty exciting development uh in fact uh so uh we know that uh AI is here to change the world uh for good or of or for bad I don't want it to it's like the internet it's gonna change things but it's up to us the jury's still out on that one right and uh now so but uh one thing that we know for sure is that uh AI is going to consume more and more electric power and uh it's not a sustainable mode uh to uh further uh develop uh the AI architecture by by building uh nuclear power uh plants next to data centers I don't like that idea and I don't think uh that idea can carry us much further. So instead so at QCI we're asking ourselves can we offload some complex and uh power consumption intense calculations from the digital to the analog optical domain because the moment that we can do that we can for example reduce the um power consumption per calculation by many orders of magnitude.

SPEAKER_02 26:28

In fact we have uh we have uh done some research in the lab and we find that uh uh we can use a single photon for machine learning task and uh a single photon has energy of 10 to the negative uh 19 joule so to just uh to uh put this uh in the context uh project so uh the light bulb uh in your room now is probably emitting if you have it on is probably emitting like 10 to the uh twenty two uh yes 10 to the 21 photons per second so yeah we just need uh almost no energy to to perform that project particular ai so now this is why at qci we are looking at uh photonics approach and by incorporating uh photonics neural netlock uh neural network layer with the digital layer so that we can have this hybrid uh machine architecture that uh can reduce the energy consumption by i mean 10 times i mean that's 100 times that's amazing i mean that's so much bigger than what we've seen in other things so um i don't know if you saw this in the news a while back but google came out with a way to compress memory usage by uh the the leading models and training by sixfold this is a much bigger savings and so that kind of thing I think it was called turboquant or something on that name uh from Google that came out memory management and and it it it changed the metrics of uh the cost the the data centers they were gonna build so this this kind of thing could also have a big impact is it's it's something you just announced uh in the last last month I believe right yeah so we our first uh commercial product was uh released and uh and uh last month and it's called neuron wave and uh what it does is that uh so inside the box uh so it is a hybrid uh uh neural network that uh processfully does what I said so a part of the calculation is done still done uh in digital so uh FPGA and a part of that is done in the optics and uh by combining the two actually so we have already seen significant uh um savings in the power consumption but this is is just a start yes well and and machine learning underlies everything I I learned that from Cyprian right if it's weren't for the machine learning we wouldn't be where we are in the in the LLMs right no but I think this this comes at the perfect moment because what we're seeing there is the end of the free tokens for everybody party um I think people are starting to realize that these huge models that are being used out there right are are like huge energy consumers and moving even kind of forward with these it's just going to be not sustainable. I think uh a few months ago or even perhaps a year there were a few very interesting papers that were published that were using the laws of thermodynamics to prove that there is not enough energy on this planet to achieve uh like the Skynet level of artificial intelligence because the curve is just exponentially in in increasing so I think the timing of your announcement is is just great because people are starting to realize that the the party's over and especially the energy party is is over and there is like no unlimited possibility of moving forward with what we have unless companies like you come with these amazing innovations where we literally scale it back down orders of magnitude the energy consumption.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

Yeah thank you so much I I think uh yeah so and uh uh we are um we are uh striving to contribute uh uh but uh uh say I'm glad to say that uh um there are um uh other players so they are making the effort along the same lines so I'm actually pretty optimistic that um um uh for photonics uh uh will uh uh s play more and more important role in ai so you know even a couple of years ago Nvidia is really looking at photonics to move the data from GPO to GPO right but now we we are we should be looking at photonics not just for transferring information but also but also for computing processing the information and uh I believe that uh uh there is a a very bright and um exciting future there and one thing that uh I believe everybody will benefit from is that uh the tokens could uh become cheaper and cheaper as we adopt more and more photonics because the energy consumption will be will uh will drop down significantly as we integrate more and more photonics into the AI architecture.

SPEAKER_02 32:42

And we have to say something before we we stop right which is critical photonics and if we talk about in the context of energy photonics has one like huge advantage which is it operates at room temperature.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Yes that's yeah well so actually uh this is a uh not a very um very uh interesting topic that uh um uh if I may I want to share some uh thoughts that I have had for a long time. Please uh as a physics re researcher actually so I feel that uh um there's a uh major misconcept that quantum can only happen at room temperature so in fact if you open any quantum mechanics book there's no such thing called a cryogenic or or uh or cold or or closed system in fact so we have seen so many signs that uh quantum effects do exist at room temperature in fact so quantum effects are already with us in the in many biological systems so and I I'm not sure if if you guys heard that uh actually so the photosynthesis uh processes that happen uh now in any green plant so there are quantum effects there right so in fact quantum effects help uh uh transport in the the the the energy and to store at the bottom of the uh green leaves okay so quantum effects already exist uh in nature at a room temperature in complex uh biological systems we don't need to put the leaves in a cryogenic fridge in fact we'd better not do that's right so then the big question question is that uh why do we need to go to cryogenic to build quantum computers and and so nature is has already told us clearly that no you don't need to do that and this is uh also uh a guiding philosophy at qc i i've been telling everybody that okay guys I know that uh it's easier for us to observe some quantum effects at cryogenic temperature but we don't do it at QCI everything we do is room temperature why because we want every technology that we are innovating engineering and turning that to manufacturing will end in people's hands right we don't need uh we don't want any of our users to buy that big cryogenic fridge in order to use QSI product instead amen they should be able to buy a product and put in the backpack and just use it as another say computing device communication device I I really love the philosophy you have of like letting the technology letting the physics guide how we use it and and uh not try trying not to resort to cryogenics.

SPEAKER_04 36:31

I think we're out of time but I really hope you'll come back and talk to us again.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

It's been a great conversation is there any anything uh at that you still want to mention before we wrap up uh I I just want to say that I really appreciate the for the this opportunity um uh to connect uh with uh with uh you and uh I hope that as uh my honest uh uh opinion uh actually so maybe as a physics uh professor and so so so uh uh can be perceived uh as a scientific and and uh scientific insights instead of uh um uh uh uh my comments as the CEO because I really shared uh what I have been thinking and uh what my true belief is uh yeah I think we'd be all better off if all the CEOs were also physics professors.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

I'm not sure about that thanks again for joining us and uh and hopefully we'll see you again soon thanks again bye thank you very much it's been a pleasure all right bye everybody see you next time thank you thank you bye bye cybercrime is one of the biggest threats to businesses of all sizes and industries with almost half a million open cyber positions the problem is compounded by the lack of available talent in the marketplace at Pulsar Security our elite team of highly credentialed experts collaborate with you to assess your current defenses and develop solutions tailored to your specific needs. With services ranging from cybersecurity education to advanced penetration testing and red teaming you can start reducing your risks today visit pulsarsecurity.com and let's secure your digital future together