Normie Me Gains Over $300k of Value at this Quantum Computing Workshop
Disclaimer: Everything below is a mix of what I observed and heard during the event. The goal isn’t to pinpoint "who exactly said what," but to share (usually) an outsider's view and overall perspective on these industries. I’m not here to act as a definitive firsthand source—readers should do their own research. I hope this inspires you to attend events, explore new industries, and hear what leaders are presenting. These notes combine my observations with thoughts on how things could run smoother and how ideas connect (IMO). I’m not an expert, you know? Just hanging out in the room with them. Enjoy.
Ratings: Venue (3/5), Food (5/5), Speaker Content (3.5/5), Networking (2/5), Likeliness to Return (4.5/5)
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Ratings: Venue (3/5), Food (5/5), Speaker Content (3.5/5), Networking (2/5), Likeliness to Return (4.5/5) 〰️
From what I understand, this event will let you build agents? Or things with quantum computers or something? I feel like I’ll definitely learn a lot by actually doing. Who knows hahaha. Should be interesting.
Why Attend: I’d like to learn more about quantum computing. It’s like a whole new language/situation to learn about that is wild and amazing and revolutionary.
Photo Collage and Commentary:
Notes from the Event:
I arrived a little late but was surprised that they’d started right on time. So I’m already behind on the basics of this event hahaha. Wonderful.
And actually, I was late cause I wanted to get food before this event - but turns out they have A LOT of food. like A LOT.
They’re talking about the organization of device interactions
SHOT: single circuit execution with measurement instructions on a device
TASK: atomic request to a device for circuit execution with a series of shots
JOB: sequence of classical and quantum compute cycles with a series of tasks
Okay, so every time you send a set of commands its 8 cents, the group costs 30cents - and we’re all sharing the device.
if we were to use entire/complete control of the computer, you’d reserve it for $7,000/HOUR!!!
LOL so I’m saving $21,000 by attending this event. $21,000 of value hahaha.
Actually, we have 48 hours of access so thats over 300k!! LOLLL
You can reserve it online
For the record, I have LITERALLY no idea what we will get into hahaha. But my hope is I walk out of this event with more insight on how to run my business and/or use my new laptop I got yesterday (for free! Gifted to me) for Open Claw or something? Maybe this will help hahahah omgggg.
Are we logged into the quantum computer and looking into notebooks and something?
Hahah should I be pulling an all-nighter with this effing $168,000 value for just 24 hours hahaha??? I’ve got another event to attend tonight, but then when I go home, shouldn’t I go balls to the wall with this quantum computer access for free, hahahha, right? I mean idk but right??? hahahahahhaha. This is so funny
On a scale of 0-10 I understand this at a 0. I looked it up “who uses this”
Who uses this: researchers, PhD students, quantum computing startups, Amazon's own engineering teams, defense contractors, and pharmaceutical companies modeling molecular structures. And today, a tutoring company founder from Seattle who showed up late and didn't understand any of it.
hahahah okay. and hilariously, my neighbor is trying to talk me through how to do this and whats going on
how half the time we ran a function and half the time it got a result of 11 and half the time a result of 00. We just ran a real quantum experiment. bhahahahha omg. Okay?
This guy next to me is trying to explain this to me - but like in the sense he thinks i know what functions and quibits and expected outcomes are as expected, etc. hahahhahaha.
I THOGUHT I”D BE BUILDING AN AGENT IN THIS EVENThahahahhahaha. omg.
This is so funny. I’m in the wrong event. But I love it. I need to figure out one thing to do with this thing of value in the next 24 hours.
This guy is just talking about cubes and baskets and bell things and queue type. He said only 4 people are on track right now (and there are 22 people in this event haha)
I wonder how many people are here on the same page as me.
We’re running cells, if you remember the first cell we ran it was to run the cost tracker.
One girl says she’s never done anything like this before, but then she asks what’s the difference between the AWS bracket and (something I didn’t understand)
hahaha so she’s in her zone here.
Even one lady is here with her newborn baby strapped to her chest. I love it. This funny, funny event.
But I know that i can click on one code block at a time, then press the “play” button and then it makes things happen like we’re supposed to be doing. And so its like you’re doing experiments in real time but also just pressing one button. It's like a game but you only have one button to press and there’s no time limit, and you have one line life, but also you can’t lose your life hahahahahhaha.
like technically i’m completing the tasks but i have no idea what i’m doing,. its like playing the piano but you only need to press one key to play the song, and the song has no tempo.
OMg this guy net to me is like, “ I see it’s cued but…” and then the guy is like “click on quantum tasks” -
He says, in the interest of time, we’ll get back to this. We have a scheduled break and we’ll have a breather to talk about… idk what hahahaha. I feel like i’m on an episode of Broad City or something.
This guy next to me was geeking out cause he was like, see! They were entangled!! hahahahah idkkkkk hahahhahhahahaha. omg.
ahahaha i just pressed play until it told me “you completed lesson 1, well done!’ ahahhahahaha. omgggggggggg.
Now we’re going to talk about physics, math, and differential equations. Basics on what’s happening in the quantum computers.
The history of trapping ions is switching from plut so minus and creating a changing potential. Where atoms, when the chargers start positive, tehy basically repel the possible charge time and got to move then switch to negative, which moves them back.
He likes the more classical illustration, while its a ball on a saddle shape and when you rotate it fast enough, the ball will stay in its place. Imagine you have a charged particle, and if you start it will nto be exactly in the same place it will jsut get there, and when you speed it up, the simulation makes it pull kinetic energy out of the ions and eventually it end sup oin teh middle that show you keep them on one line and then to keep them oving along the line, you simply add additional positive potential form both sided, squeezing them together.
You need to have a lot of lasers, take four wires, and put them in one line. You can still preserve and trap ions. Its so much easier to produce and manufacture those working changers. The working devices, chips.
All the ions sitting in a line, how do we interact with them? With lasers. With a laser, you can target one ion. Modify or change the rotation of the speed of this ion. Or you can target two ions simultaneously.
Classically, an analog would be the standing wave. When the ions move in the same direction, if we target those two, we manipulate the speed. They share vibrational modes. The laser beams start to share the same state. If they’re fully entangled. If we measure one in one state, the second ion will be in the same speed. as well.
The current architecture that we use in the Fort Enterprise Machine, but now we’re switching to QCCD Systems with electronic Qubit control.
Instead of having a long chain of ions, we reduce it to a relatively small chain of 8 ions. Instead of manipulating the state of the lasers, we are using a task.
Architecture is based on building larger quantum computers by … (he changed slides)
If we move the ion just a little bit to the side, it will idk what - it'll change the speed of the ion.
What do we have inside the architecture? We can move individual ions by simply changing the potential along the elements on the chip. We can also entangle 2 qubits simultaneously, bringing them into an operational area. Sharing vibration modes together. Among the nonzero magnetic fields, we can do a lot of operations in parallel now. Changing the different amplitudes and how far away we move ions from the zero access.
Each machine will have a big optical system, a lack of control… it’s scalable, but a lot of work, resources. Switching to QCCD allows us to minimiturization or minimize… we basically reduce the size and this huge laser system we’d need to carry, we can cahnge with electromagnetic fields.
One guy asks why logical qubits are different compared to physical.
lollll whattttt to all of this
Logical is a group. If one physical lots its state, you might not know it happened. With logic, you have a way to cross-check. To be told if all physical qubits are in the correct state? Or one lost it.
Make sure you have the exact one that you expected. Really good questions.
What type of problems can be solved with using logical qubits?
so, um, some of the big problems like quantum chemistry and applications, even with 36 qubits, we can address quantum problems.
popularized and hyped problem is breaking (id what?) this probably will require a million qubits based on the latest Google paper. Mediological qubits. Was it logical or physical? Let’s say logical. Depending on the schema. There are different ways to encode logic in physical. Some can reduce. Um. Maybe its even less right now. Lots of advances, even in the algorithms.
hahahahah huhhhh? What problem?
Uh the base, you can reduce the number of qubits you need but the duration of calcualations it he tradeoff. A smaller system but less time or a bigger system is even faster.
Ahhahaha, I can’t believe that was an answer to his question.
with more qubits, there will definitely be complexity with your design. That will willingly or not weigh into how you’re evolving your code. In the ideal world, we will have quantum applications in such a way that a developer does not care about architecture. We had this conversation today with my colleagues.
Imagine we are in the early ages of classical computers. What were they used before? After binary codes and punch cards, we’re positioned to the assembler. You needed to know the underlying architecture. Then you get abstract. There are several layers of instruction.
99.9% sure that will happen with quantum as well. It’s very basic quantum computing.
abstract those primitives so people think about not manipulating the qubit state here and there. We’re about 5-10 years away from that.
As we get to 1,000 qubits, we will be thinking about the topology of a household. It’s interesting just to think about this. How do qubit links look in a quantum computer? How do we track this?
bhahahah I feel like I’m in a comedy show but just don’t get the jokes. hahahha but I get that they’re jokes. But it’s like they’re just super smart comments. I’m just thinking like, if life is a simulation, this is a funny moment in my life that i’ve wandered into.
Skywater is on its way. We’re investing in a lot of quantum-related technologies to build an ecosystem around it. Hedging before getting to practical. size of qubits working on quantum sensing.
Space era, land sea. We need to figure out next. Digging company i’m not sure if i can afford to buy it. So we will thinka bout it. Space, air, land se.
What types of problems can we solve? A lot!
logistics: Airbus and cargo loading (yay, Flexport)
Pharma: AstraZeneca drug discovery
automotive: QML and chemistry and battery charging
Energy: grid optimization and novel QITE algorithm enables massibve scale range of problems
Machine learning, we’ve demonstrated that about ahlaf a year ago when the already trained LLM was used, with what they did was use fine-tuning of that model to, simple problems and sentiment analysis.
Interestingly enough, compared to the classical method, we converged to the marginalized solution more than the classical ones.
With the ubtis we can encode more information adn observe the concept of what it’s trying to find more than the classic one. Cause of the linearity in quantum qubits, we don’t have much of the linearity trying to break out like classical systems.
The one he has is quantum chemistry. Actually, we have two folks in the room who can speak about this in detail. So, uh let’s let them talk about chemistry. and coding.
Bottom line, I hope I gave you a bit of a glimpse of what’s happening on the physics level. It’s real, in a lab, and now down to pretty much like a business product. We invested in the whole system related to quantum. I’m personally excited about that, and I think in the next 2-3 years, if AI doesn’t make batteries out of us, we will see interesting things happening in the quantum space. Thank you very much.
We still have 2 labs left.
But I’ll get going - I want to go to the next event, and these “labs” are literally just me pressing a “play” button and not understanding anything.
I have another event to go to - a crazy event. A mixer with SVB!!! I don’t know why they kept their name.
Until next time, I wish you the motivation and success to search for opportunities around your area. Search and explore: Who is out there giving talks? There are new things happening all of the time.
Find relatable or interesting topics you like and check them out! Maybe even something hosted at a cool venue, if there’s no other reason to go. Let’s see what you can learn and discover not too far from home. 😊
