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HBR presents

Hi there, I'm Azim Azar and you're listening to the exponential view podcast every week.

I'm in deep conversation with a brilliant mind exploring technology and the near future.

Now, my guest today believes the single most important technology for the future is quantum computing

and he is determined to build the world's first genuinely useful general purpose quantum computer.

Jeremy O'Brien is the co-founder and CEO of Psy Quantum,

who have boldly committed to producing a 1 million qubit quantum computer with just a handful of years.

And that is thousands of times ahead of the current best efforts built by the major tech companies like Google and IBM.

Now quantum computing is full of the weird phenomenon counterintuitive ideas of the quantum world

and I know that many of you will relish learning more.

One key idea to take with you is that the qubit is both a physical unit.

It's sort of equivalent to a transistor in a traditional computer,

but it's also a unit of information equivalent to the bit of the classical computer.

Now, it's estimated that a useful quantum computer needs about 100 functioning qubits.

But because there's so much noise at the quantum scale,

it turns out that any functioning device will need around a million physical qubits,

the things that we actually manufacture to generate those 100 functional logical qubits.

Now Jeremy's approach, unlike most of his competitors, uses light, photons to do the computation.

It's an avenue that was only imagined to be possible thanks to very recent theoretical breakthroughs,

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