Welcome to Impact Quantum, where curiosity meets real-world quantum insight! In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Bob Sutor—yes, the Bob Sutor—author of "Dancing with Qubits" and CEO of the Sutor Group Intelligence and Advisory. With decades of experience in computing, Bob brings a rare blend of wisdom, clarity, and wit to the conversation.

Join us as we dive deep into the rapidly evolving quantum industry. We uncover why there are 85 quantum hardware companies (and why that number is likely to shrink), debate the eternal hype cycle versus real breakthroughs, and explore why quantum computing careers might just be tailor-made for today’s teenagers. Along the way, you’ll learn about the shifting balance between classical and quantum coding, get candid advice on navigating technical press releases, and hear how the software revolution could soon outpace hardware innovations in quantum—just like it did in the early days of the PC industry.

Whether you’re a seasoned quantum pro or new to the field, this episode will leave you smarter, more skeptical, and certainly more quantum curious.

Grab your headphones and get ready for an engaging, down-to-earth exploration of quantum tech’s future!

Links

Dancing with Qubits - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1837636753?tag=datadrivenm0e-20

Time Stamps

00:00 "Impact Quantum: Exploring Qubits"

05:03 "Learning Qubits Without Physics"

09:40 "AP Physics, AI, and Choices"

13:14 Quantum Hardware and Academic Persistence

15:02 Quantum Computing Market Shakeout

20:07 "James Webb Telescope Collaboration"

21:20 Quantum Integration Challenges

25:55 "Identifying Buzzword Headlines"

29:55 "Early Stage Investing Insights"

32:15 "Transitioning to Quantum Leadership"

37:34 "Reproducibility in Research Results"

38:41 Quantum Computing: NISQ to Fault Tolerance

44:40 "Moore's Law and Tech Evolution"

46:56 "Dancing with Cubits Journey"

51:16 "Young Minds Embrace Quantum Computing"

52:26 "Nostalgia and Evolving Media Trends"

56:31 Quantum Industry News Aggregator

58:46 "Quantum Insights with Dr. Souter"

Hello, and welcome to Impact Quantum, the podcast where quantum

curiosity meets real world insight. You don't need a

PhD in quantum mechanics, just an open mind and

a willingness to explore the weird and wonderful world of quantum

computing. In this episode, we sit down with Dr.

Bob Suter. Yes, the Bob Suter, author of

Dancing with Kubits, who modestly refers to himself as the chief

bottle washer of the Sutor Group. With a

career spanning more than half the age of the computer industry.

His words, not ours, Bob brings a unique mix

of wisdom, wit, and quantum clarity to our conversation.

We talk about everything from the dance of the qubits, the hype

cycle of breakthroughs, to the impending shakeout among the

85. Yes, 85 quantum hardware companies,

and of course, the critical question, why is quantum so

full of promise, yet still so full of press releases?

So grab your headphones, brace for entanglement, and

join us as we explore quantum computing's evolution with one of

the industry's most experienced voices.

Hello, and welcome back to Impact Quantum, the podcast where we explore the emerging industry

of quantum computing. And you don't need to be a super

duper Quantum physicist with PhDs and multiple degrees.

You just need to be curious. So with me is the most quantum

curious person I know, and

Candice Kahuli. How's it going, Candace? It's great. It's going great. Today

I'm really excited. In the green room, we got had. We're having such

a good conversation that we had to stop it so that we could. We could

save it for the ring and get it. Get it on for the show for

everyone. So today we're going to be speaking to

Dr. Bob Sutter, and he is, as he

calls himself, the chief bottle washer,

but he is the chief executive officer and founder of the Suiter

Group Intelligence and Advisory. Hi, Bob. How are

you today there? Yeah. And they'll never know what they missed right before we started

recording. That's right. That's right. Maybe people have to have, like, a Patreon level.

It was cool. Yeah. They weren't bloopers.

Right. But they were. What do they call them? You know, like, back scene, behind

the scenes. Yeah. Backstage pass or something like that. Yeah, that's a good idea.

We're looking for creative ways to monetize. So I'm

really excited to have you on the show because when Candace said she was talking

to you, I'm like, that name sounds familiar. And then I looked over

my bookshelf and I was like, that's where I know his

name. From that is the second and,

as I say, final edition of Dancing with Cubits.

You must have just finished it because authors always say that, this is my last

book. This is my last thing. And then it's just like having kids, right? You're

like, this is my last one. A few years later.

Well, there are two editions of that. There was a Python book in the middle.

I do have a couple of other ones, but I. I've gotten so busy.

Right. That you let a couple months go by and you think of a completely

different book to write and then say, okay, but I think I have one more

in me. Let's put this way, at least one more. That's cool. That's cool.

I always say, as someone who's been in the media publishing industry

pretty much my entire career, I always tell people, once you get the first one

out, it's much easier to write the

second one and then the third one because you realize you can do

it. You can get to the end and you can put it

all together in a beautiful package. So you say you have one more in you.

I don't know. You might have a few more after that. I don't know.

The first edition of that book, I estimated at one point it took me

1500 hours. And then because

of some book processing things, another hundred or so,

and I figured, well, the second edition, I'll just update it. Right.

No big deal. That was another 1200 hours because,

you know, some things had changed. Things that I expected to happen did not

happen. Right. And then there's the rearrangement and the

improving the discussions and things like that. But

except for like three or four known errors, I'm done with that one.

Okay, I'll take you at your word. Okay. Okay.

For what it's worth, there was like 15 years, no,

13 years difference from my first book and my second book. So

I feel I. I did my first one in 92.

Oh, wow, 1992. I had papers and things and books.

But when you're. When you're kind of on the research side, if you will, you

know, So I was in IBM Research, then I was on the business side.

I didn't want to write a book about a product, to be honest with you.

Right. Yeah. Because that has a shelf life of about two years. And then

like, oh, isn't that cute? Version 1.2. Right, right.

But I started writing qubits, dancing with

qubits, because I moved over to IBM Quantum, and I needed to learn

about it. I'm a mathematician by training, but I Had never done it.

And I looked around at a few sources and frankly, I didn't think any of

them were for me, you know, So I started reading things on the web. I

started reading papers and this and that and whatever. Many people

assume that you had several years of advanced physics.

I didn't. I didn't. But you look at it and it's mostly

math, right? It's inspired by physics, obviously.

So, you know, I said, well, there's no book like

the type of book I would want to read. So I wrote it. There you

go. And that's a good reason, you know, if you will. Right. You know,

scratch your own itch as people sometimes software developers say.

Right. No, I mean, that's a good point. Right. Because, you know, if

you see a missing piece in the

market and you can add and you can fill that, then you don't know really

how many other people like you, you've helped who may not have a book in

them or the ability to go through it. Writing a

book is a bit like a marathon, right? It's like anyone can more or less.

Anyone can run for, you know, 10, 15ft,

but can you do it for 26 miles in a row?

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required. There is the total

book and I always work top down, right. So that is, I lay

out all the chapters first and then I. And then I put.

Spend a lot of time looking for the little quotes at the top of the.

You know, Isaac Albert Einstein. Yeah. I don't even know what it's about,

but I need to have a quote that somehow relevant, you know, it's my

method. And then you put in maybe the sections. Now you have to assume all

that's going to change, right. Once you get really going and then

you get through it and then you have to go back. So it's sort of

like running a marathon where you can see the end, but you keep going back

and rerunning little sections in the middle. Better.

It's almost very fractal, Right. Like it can be,

yeah, that's right. And you have to say at some point, it's done

right. You can always do it forever. The

second time around, I was really very lucky. I had several

very, very good technical editors and friends in the industry and

a student, in fact, who really looked at

this doesn't make sense, Bob.

I'm sorry, but there's something not right about this one. And then I'd go

back and so you need

that. And that's something you learn as well as you go along.

And that's why the second edition, I think, is, well, it's better than the

first. And as far as I'm concerned, it's good enough for quite a while.

The intro, the first two chapters is really all I've gotten

through. And it's not because of the book, it's because life events

happening and things like that. But I definitely want to.

I may have to read through the first chap of chapters because it's been a

minute since I did that. But the intro, seriously. And

apparently in the virtual green room, you were saying that people will recommend

this book just for the first couple of chapters because it is that good. It

is a good. I thought I knew. I wouldn't say I knew it all, but

I knew a lot. But I learned some from the intro stuff, right?

So I was like, wow, that's an interesting way to put it. I never thought

of it that way. Like, there's a lot of moments like that. And

you know, what's really funny was,

you know, the learn to code movement and all

that is obviously run its course, I would

imagine. And so literally last,

towards the end of last school year, I get a phone call, email

from one of my, my teenagers, you

know, comp sci students, because he has, he's taking AP classes and it's

like, yeah, he's not taking comp sci, like the next version next semester. And I'm

like, that's weird. So I kind of didn't say

anything me about it, which Candace has, also has kids that are older than

mine. Apparently. That's normal. So like, I, I, I basically kind of like went to

him and said like, you know, in a more polite way, wtf?

Why are you not taking this? Right? And

mom was real upset too, right? So like, so, so, so I

said, why are you not taking? He goes, oh, because I was ready for like,

for a fight about this, right? And he goes, no, I decided to take

AP Physics next semester too, because it's only offered, but so, so often,

I don't know I can't argue with that. Yeah, right. I

can't argue with that. Right? Because the whole learn to code and a lot of.

Lot of angst around what the future of software

engineering and computer science is going to be because of AI. And

so I couldn't argue with that. So then we met. Then we drove over and

we met mom, and mom was also spoiling for a fight,

and I had to hold her back. Like, no, no, no, no, no. He's taking

physics. Yeah. Wait till the punch. Okay, it's okay.

Don't bury the lead. Okay? It's okay because,

like, you know, you know, when you're married long enough, you know, you. You know,

you know the look, right? And I'm like, no, no, hold off, hold off.

Yeah, cancel. Hit the. Hit the cancel button.

I used to get a lot of questions from students, right,

Saying this quantum stuff. Should I major in physics? Should I do

computer science? Should I do something else? Right.

About four years ago, I said, major in physics, but minor in computer science.

But at some point, this will switch. There was an

article in the Financial Times a few weeks ago that I was quoted in. And

basically the gist is if you look at the history of computing, you know, people

come up with new processors. Like, remember, if you can remember way back, the

Pentium until Pentium, right? Long time ago. It hurts when you

say way back, because I remember that. Well, it is way back.

And people get so obsessed with gigabytes and

megabytes and, oh, this is so fast. And then you kind of realize

the hardware is interesting, but it's what you do with it. And

so now on the phone, yeah, I want a better camera, maybe, right? At

some point, maybe more memory, but it's the apps. So

it's always the case in the history that the software

exceeds the hardware, the hardware goes underground a little bit. There are fewer people

working on it. We sort things out. That is generally not the

case right now in Quantum, right? People really want to tell you about their

amazing qubits. It's almost like classically like, can I tell you

about transistors before I teach you how to write an iPhone

app? Right? It's like, no, you can't. I don't really

need to know that. But. But that's coming. All right, it's

coming. And a lot of things have to happen. I mean, there are many,

many, many quantum hardware companies right now. By my count,

85. Oh, wow. Just hardware.

That number, you know, a healthy number

would be about a quarter of that, right? Probably will

be. And that's the thing, right? We have, let's say you

have 85 different hardware companies. They're all competing.

It's like a little Sputnik race, you know, they're competing to be the first out,

you know, and you know, maybe it's the Canadian in me, but, you

know, I think, I think they would go much faster if there was more

collaboration and people weren't trying

to be the first ones there to get the first working, you know,

system going. There are a few things, you know.

So quantum hardware fundamentally comes from physics and engineering, right?

If it's coming from physics, it's coming usually from a very good academic

lab. And these people, let's say whoever,

let's say the professor has been doing, they've been doing this stuff forever

and they are true believers in their approach.

They have staked their careers, the papers and getting tenure

and things. And they can't necessarily just say,

whoops, I'm going to do that over there, at least until they get

tenure.

And, and so there is a lot of kind of pride in

that and you know, wanting to make it big and

maybe financially doing well financially, but when

push comes to shove, right, if you can't get the people to do it for

you, if you, if the investors aren't coming through eventually,

if revenue is just not in your forecast, you gotta kind

of say, you know, I sell the ip, I merge, I do something else.

And that will happen, you will see, I think next

year quite a bit going on.

Regarding this. We have

several public quantum computing companies,

right? And people always talk about, well, there's IonQ and there's Rigetti

and there's D Wave, which really does quantum annealing. And there's

Quantum Computing Inc. Well, yeah, okay, but there's also like

IBM, which is a public company, right? And Google and

Nvidia does some things and Microsoft, only

these massive, you know, huge corporations versus,

you know, the startup which says, I just got $5 million and you

know, corporation said, I spent that yesterday. Right, right, right, right, right.

So there's going to be this shakeout, there will be more companies going public.

Inflection company I used to work for for a couple of years

after IBM announced they're going public via spac.

So as we look across the different ways of doing quantum computing,

superconducting ion traps, neutral atoms, photonic

silicon spin, those are the top five. And then the remaining

five are a little bit more esoteric. The public market will only support

so many companies doing these things. Right. We're not

going to have 10 public superconducting quantum

computer companies. Right. So. And you've already got IBM and Google.

So there's going to be these moves and it's very complicated based on

sovereign issues. Right. And geopolitical issues and,

of course, financing and things like this. So

I think things will probably stabilize within a few years.

The minimum number is probably about 10 public companies,

I would think, doing quantum computing hardware. And that's just saying

roughly two for the top five modalities. That's all. It's just an

approximation. See that? Because you saw that with cars, right?

Automobile industry, right. People forget. People forget. A lot

of the brands that are part of, like GM today used to be separate car

companies and they consolidated, I think. I think, was it.

Chevrolet was a separate company at one point. Ford and Lincoln, I think were

separate companies a lot. But a lot of the brands

that we think of as like, oh, that's a, you know, it's a Ford brand,

right? Like that. They used to be. They used to be separate companies and they

consolidated just long before we were. Around and there were brands that just

disappeared. Pontiac. Pontiac, Right. Yep.

You also have things like, if we're going to keep with the car analogy,

you know, Japanese companies, right? Yeah, that's right. Toyota, you have Nissan.

Right. And at least at the beginning, there was no question they

were Japanese companies. So they're now international and

things like this. And my American Chevy, you know, my first

couple of cars were Chevy Impalas. They were all made in Ottawa, right? Yeah.

Took my Chevy to the levy, but it was actually made in Ottawa. I've driven

by the Ford plant on the way to Toronto many times. Right, right, right. There's

a lot of traffic there because all those highways converge. Yeah,

yeah. So. And there will be, you know,

this mix of countries actually saying, right, we shall

have, you know, a leading, probably public quantum computing company

and this, that or whatever. Right. You speak of the eu,

but France is very strong, UK is very strong. Right. Germany,

Finland's coming on and other stories around the world. So this is

why I'm saying maybe you might say 10 is sort of right. But then

you have a country saying, oh, we will be represented in this

club. And that's why I said, maybe we'll shrink

from 85 to 20, 25 public.

Some will be acquired, always new ones will pop up, but it will be

dynamic. But there will be this consolidation and reduction in

numbers next year and the year after, I think. No, I mean, that makes sense.

Right. And it attracts too. Right. Particularly with the sovereign Issue. Right. Because automobile

manufacturing is, you know, in, in, in the, in the big

grand scheme of history is also a proxy for how many tanks can

you make. Right. Like if it, if things hit the fan. Right. That's why,

that's why there's always a push to have a domestic production of cars, not just

in the US but like kind of in every country wants to have that.

And, and again, just keeping up the cars. And I mentioned Germany, you know, you've

got BMW, you've got BMW, you'Ve got Volkswagen. Right? Right.

Things like this. So off the top of your head, if I ask you

to name five companies, car companies. Right, Right. And then

I say, okay, give me the next 10, well, you're going to be able to

find them. Right? Yeah. And once again, all these car companies

are international, right. At this point, but they're there

for a reason. At different times they've been propped up or supported by their

governments. Right. There are

policies within the individual

countries to drive, you know, originally the automotive or other

industries. And in the same way you have many national

quantum strategy policies around the world. Right.

And I think that's good and I think it guides a lot of,

you know, the investment. A lot of them are kind of feel good. Aren't we

great? You know, we're, we just are so wonderful and we're

going to conquer the world. Right. I saw something this morning. We shall

dominate the quantum computing industry,

oddly enough. You know, and I used to talk a lot about this last

year is what they don't have is an industrial policy to

actually create a quantum computer. Computer. Right, right.

So what the analogy I used a lot. Yes. Last year was the

Apollo program. What's the goal? Go to the moon,

come back safely. That was hard to state. Right.

Is it complicated? Yes, it is complicated. Right. Do, do

lots of different things have to come in? Many different companies

were involved with that. In fact, I, I ran a panel last year

and we're talking about the, the Hubble, the,

the space telescope. And you would think, yeah,

it's okay, but it's not like going to the moon and Mars. You

know, it's fairly. And I had someone from NASA on the panel and I said,

you estimate were involved with the development of the

Hubble Space Telescope? Actually, let me

update myself. It was the James Webb telescope. It was the new

one. So, and I don't know what number I

was expecting a couple hundred. He said, yeah, at least 5,000.

Because there are a lot of components. Right. There are systems and subsystems and

components and this and that, supply chains and all. And someone makes those

little screws and rivets. Right, Exactly.

So when we talk about quantum systems, not

just look at my handful of qubits and what it can do,

honest to goodness, huge quantum systems, maybe they have

some cryogenics. Right, right. More cryogenics.

The different modalities, the electrical supplies. I did

a panel at Quantum World Congress last week on

integration of quantum with high performance computing.

What does that even mean? What does it mean from a hardware perspective? What does

it mean? Because in fact, the systems will probably show up for meaningful

problems in such integrations. So the

deeper you go, you also find it's very broad and there

are lots of details and there can be many, many players.

So any quantum company you look at will be one in

the supply chain in the overall development of these

systems as well. They're going to be complicated.

Interesting. So you were, you were at the world, the Quantum World Congress,

you said last week, and I'm sure you listened to some other

talks by other industry leaders. Was there any information

that you came across that you found incredibly

exciting or even new?

So I have to correct you a little bit is that there are some conferences

you go to to listen to talks or do talks,

and others you hang out and chat with people.

Okay, because I did go

to some and I. The hallway sessions. Right, the hallway sessions.

And people I knew, you know, people I knew in the industry, people I worked

with, people I wanted to meet, I had

questions, I had gaps, or we just, you know, wanted to compare notes

on different things like this. I moderated four different panels, for

example. Oh, wow. On quantum

computing and apac. Quantum computing or quantum technologies and

the energy industry, the quantum HPC

integration. And then finally one which was

what do quantum builders. And here we're going to. You have to figure out what

builder means, but what do they want from government?

And I also asked them at the end, what don't you want from government?

Like, what do you want to say? Thank you very much, please stay over there.

Right. So unless

they're dishing out money. Unless they're dishing out money. Yeah,

that's true. These conferences tend to be forcing functions for announcements. You get a

whole flurry of announcements. There were.

So there were several last week there were some funding announcements.

Some people try to get in before the flurry at a big

conference. So the week before. And then what we've also seen is some people say,

well, once things calm down, I'm going to do it. So it's really,

for one of the big conferences. It's that week plus or minus a week. So

it's a three week span. I'm involved with.

Well, I'm going to Rotterdam actually I'm flying to Amsterdam tomorrow

for Quantum Tech, that will be a big one for Europe.

There's Quantum and AI at the end of October

that I'm involved with in Q2B in December and things like this.

So there's a cadence that people try to

plan. Announcements, many of them have been around investments, around

funding. There have been quite a few of those recently. In terms

of breakthroughs, you know, there's a breakthrough every day. I'm getting a little tired of

press releases about the breakthrough du jour.

It's funny you mentioned that. Yeah, no, sorry

Candace, I cut you off. No, no, no. We were just talking about this the

other day. I said, I said, okay, Frank, there's like five

new breakthroughs today. You know, it's,

it's every. There's just so much hype and

there's just so many announcements. And I kind of just wonder like, you know,

how should business leaders, you know, assess, you know,

risk versus opportunity

when they're hearing about all this incredible, interesting, you know,

innovations that's happening? So I think people

look there, there's a lot of good stuff going on, A lot of it

is incremental and. Absolutely, people need to

have a steady stream or at least a reasonable stream of news. Right?

So this means press releases, this means maybe a blog entry.

Sometimes you go back and say, this company hasn't done a press release in three

years. Like, you know, that's not quite right. And then the

other, there are several that like, if they don't have at least two a week,

they're falling behind. Right. They don't seem to realize people's eyes

glaze over and say yet one more amazing thing from

the number one self proclaimed company. Right? And

things like this. Yeah, there are. And it's again, you

know, it's for investment dollars, you know, to a large extent or, you know, one

way or another, public or private state stand

on the radar. On the, to stay on the radar

map. I do a newsletter. I've kind of shifted the way I do it,

but I generate the actual

HTML which gets published programmatically

and I go through and I look for words like breakthrough

or pioneer or first ever, and I put them in

bold, italic, just so people will see, you

know, how they do this. And there have been several, several this week, you know,

that once you get past the headline, it's like, so

they really didn't do anything, did they?

Right. You know, so someday,

once some of these calm down, I will maybe publish a list saying, here

are the keywords to look for. Right. And here are the things that should make

you ask more detailed questions. They tell you this, but they don't tell

you that. Right. So I break these things down saying,

okay, well, you're just, you're telling the truth, you're telling a great story, you're making

a choice of how technical, whatever. But everything you say is factually

correct. Right. Now maybe we'll jazz it up a little bit, marketing

and say, yeah, you're amazing. Okay. Yeah, get it exciting.

Put some sizzle into it. Yeah. And then you kind of move into the danger

zone, which is lying by commission, where you are

actively saying something false. That tends not to happen

so much in press releases as it doesn't talks, you know.

Right. Sometimes it's not common, but it does happen

occasionally. And then the other is lying by omission,

which is, I'm telling you this, but if you knew this

thing, you maybe wouldn't think things were quite as wonderful as I'm trying to give

you the impression. And it, it's,

it's that latter one that kind of, at least, you know,

more education helps the more you know about these things of how

to, how to interpret what people say. Right. Here's the question.

They say they did this. Well, now you follow up with this question.

But what about that? Right, right. So

that's why I, I consider part of my role, if you will, whatever it is

in the industry is just trying to educate people about how to think about

what is happening and how to cut through. We'll call it

hype, good hype, bad hype, whatever. But to the essence of what has really

happened. Right. Well, that makes a lot of sense.

Right. It's

reminds me a lot of the dot com

era, like kind of early on, obviously,

AI is very. A lot of what's going on in AI right now is definitely

very reminiscent. Of the. Dot com era.

But do you think that, do you think

it as venture capitalists kind of start walking

away from not walking away, but

as the AI space becomes so saturated that a lot of that

venture capital money may start flowing towards quantum and we'll start seeing a quantum hype

wave get even crazier?

I think it will be. So I don't know if

it's moving away. And now maybe

that's a little pessimistic. Well, well. But there are ways this happens. So, for

example, I track

investors in quantum companies. I know I

don't track how much money they necessarily go in. I just want to know who

at some point has thrown money into it. Right. But people who are

seed investors may not still be investors by the time you get to series

A or series B. Right, right. They just have to, as someone termed it, they

just have to find the next set of believers. Right. The investor

believers. Right. So, quote, walking away may

be you say, well, I did well. Right. I focus on

very early stage. Now it's advancing. I

will, quote, redeem, if you will, someone else will pick

up, I will get my money. But now I'm out of the picture

here. So that may happen. And certainly there is the

analysis of saying, well, do we go with AI, do we

go with quantum with investing?

And this is something that I think a lot of

tech people need to understand. So left to my own

devices, I would say, you know, I really want the best people

with the best technology to win. Right.

To just, just have the greatest company and do well, you know,

commercially and all this. And that sounds nice. Okay.

Sometimes if you take a purely capitalist

investment saying, I really don't care what the tech is, I

just want to make a lot of money, I want to invest and come

out the other end having done quite well.

And then once I'm out of the picture, it's whatever it is. Right. Right.

Now, in truth, things tend to be a combination of those two, but it is

a balance. It's a mixture of these two things.

And in the same way, Right. You know, someone who is

invested by starting a company. Right. That's a form of investment.

Yeah. I think they would kind of like to do well financially

as opposed to saving the world with this quantum modality. Right.

Or something. So a mixture is reasonable.

But don't forget, there are people all along that

spectrum of technological innovation and massive

success. And of course, the, the

ancient example is always Betamax, right. Versus Versus

vhs. Right, right. And for anybody who isn't old

enough, before D, before BLU Ray, before

DVDs, we had these things called tapes,

and that's where we put movies and home things. And there were

competing formats. And people tend to say, well,

you know, of the two, it wasn't the best one that

won. No. Betamax was way better. But vhs,

they figured out how to come out cheaper

and they won the race. Right.

And you start getting into this good enough. Right,

right. Which is. And there are cliches about that, but sometimes it's

really the question, you know, you can't say, I'm going to sit on this technology

for four more years until it's perfect. Well, someone else owns the

market and they're not going to give you the time of day. So.

So this business thing is tough. And when you start with a CEO who's

typically, it's a physicist in quantum, it's fun to

look at them and in fact, investors look at them and saying, how is this

person transitioning from a very smart

academic person to being an honest to goodness company

CEO? Right. And I, I look at that too. And, and

sometimes people like me are brought in in various ways to

kind of advised, right. This, this is what a big company looks like. This

is the normal life cycle of technologies.

Right. When you see this, that means this is happening in the bigger

world. So that's a fair question. Right. Like, so I went

to, I went to a Quantum conference and it was interesting because you've been

around long enough to know like your traditional tech conference,

your typical tech conference is mountains of swag,

hype, craziness, loud, obnoxious.

Right. Like the big, it's like a big party. But when I went to the

Quantum one, it was kind of, it was warm, mellow, definitely had an academic, heavy

academic influence, but there was also, it was also wasn't a pure

academic conference either. Right. It had kind of that hybrid type of

feel. It's almost like, you know, I live in, I live near the

Chesapeake. Right. So there's like part of it that's part of it's fresh water, part

of it's salt water. Right, Right. So. And there's also the brackish estuary water in

the middle. That's how I felt with. Right. Like where it was kind of a

little bit of both. And I think the industry as a whole is slowly becoming

more and more business focused

as opposed to academic focus. And it's interesting that you point that out.

Generalizing. I think the Quantum ecosystem

of people is very congenial, right? Yes, I would say so.

Very friendly people. Great to talk to things like this.

When money, when big money enters into the picture, things change.

Right. Because now you really have to look at these other people

as competitors and frankly, threats, right? Yeah. I mean, not

personally, but, you know, the company you represent.

And so things get a little bit more frosty. And I've seen that

in other cycles of the computer industry

it will happen. You know, it's just normal.

You find other things to talk about, but we're not

quite there. Even though there's some investment dollars what's missing is massive

revenue. Right. So you might say, well, they're competing

for investment dollars, but no one is competing in a, you

know, $30 billion market.

Most of the sales that any of these people are doing are to research

institutions. Right. They're selling very small quantum computers and

they're selling them, you know, some revenue and they're learning how to make

them and they're learning a number of things, but it's not like they're selling them

to hundreds of enterprise companies by any means to do commercial

work that that's in the future. I mean, that makes

a lot of sense. So yeah, And I've worked the Microsoft booth

at open source conventions before. Microsoft had its, you know,

you know, aha moment about open source. Yeah. So yeah, I know

how frosty it can get. Yeah, I was in a lot of those. I was

the IBM corporate vice president for Open Source and standards in the early

2000s, so. Oh wow. That whole, you know, GPL3

royalty free standards, I lived through all that and working with others

on it as well. And it, it's fascinating sometimes,

I mean, just, you know, say, well, let's talk about open source and

quantum. What's the combination? And it still

is there, but it's less fraught with like, oh, we're giving away

all this ip, why shall we do this? And things like that.

Because 25 years have gone by. I would hope so. Well,

and we were talking just last week to these researchers

in France and you'd mentioned also France is

really a fertile ground for startups in the

quantum space. And, and they were offering this opportunity

to use their technology. Anyone could use it as

long as they published a paper about what the results were. And

it was like this open quantum computing community.

I thought that that sounded incredibly attractive,

you know, that everyone could kind of come together that way and talk

about their results. So yeah,

yeah, I mean, with any of these. I'm much young publishing.

There's one thing to publish a paper, let's say in Nature, right. Or one of

the physics review things. It's another just to throw something on Archive,

which they do have standards. But you know

what, with a lot of these. And we were talking again before

we started about breakthroughs, right.

When people publish numbers, if it's truly significant,

somebody else should be able to come in and reproduce this,

right. And so you can look at these papers that have

lots of numbers and beautiful graphs and error bars and things

like this. But is it reproducible? Are the results?

You're showing what we call Hero results.

You saw this wonderful thing one time and one time only out of

10,000 runs. Right. But darn it, yeah. Are we talking about

means? Are we talking about medians or you know, and things

like this? So, you know, Arxiv is a pre publishing thing.

It does do a great job of having a lot of people see what the

research is. And it's open, they can read it, they can learn whatever

papers can be updated. It's usually the first

step before you go for Nature or some other journal

and things like this. Ultimately, as is

the case, like with AI, machine learning, lots of other

things, high performance computing, there will be third

party benchmarking. You know, benchmarking is being

developed, but someone else who says, you know, I don't care what you say, I

actually ran this on your quantum computer and this is what I got.

Right. I don't care what you got in your lab. When a user

uses it, this is what they see, right. And so that,

that will start happening. It's complicated though.

And you know, there's always this question, we haven't talked about it yet, but

NISQ versus fault tolerance and where are we now

and where do we have to be? You know, I think in 30 years

we're in this NISK era. Noisy, noisy intermediate

quantum computing and we're moving toward fault tolerance

where at least the qubits and the operations have far fewer errors. Not perfect,

but far, far fewer errors. I think

if we could fast forward 30 years, we will look back at this era

that we're in as being a little quaint. Like,

oh, oh, they thought they could do amazing things before fault

tolerance, right? Yeah, they did a few things. They, yeah,

definitely had good research directions, but

some of them were, some of these people were kidding themselves. So

we're going to get to that tipping point in the next next

decade, you know, whenever it happens. But you know, in the

30s, shall we say, this will be the decade where that plays out.

And all the rest of this stuff will just be computer science and

engineering history. So people should remember that. I mean, look,

look back I mentioned, you know, Pentium we were talking about. Right,

Right, right, yeah, I remember Pentium. Yeah, 1980s. Oh, do

I have to do the calculation how many decades that was ago

Pentium was? Pentium didn't hit the market though until like the mid,

early mid-90s, right, yeah. Late 80s, early 90s things.

Yeah. Okay, one other thing. Just, just. Yeah, for

people who have been in the industry, the dual

processor, right? Dual core, right? Oh, yeah,

right now, right. Now, I don't remember exactly,

but, you know, my iPhone is something like ridiculous, like 16 cores,

16 processing units. And then there are specialized

processing units for a, and things like this. Originally

there used to be one, and in that one you could

do integers. There was a floating point unit, you know, decimals, computations.

It could do trigonometry. But there was one, right?

And, and the first time we got two was

2005 when intel and AMD both introduced them.

So 20 years ago. And now you have supercomputers with thousands

of them. If you buy, if you buy an Xbox or PlayStation,

they have, you know, I don't know the latest count. This,

this little, I, I have a little tiny desktop here. I think

this is 12 core. It's 6 inches by 6 inches,

right? So, so things change. And, and the same things you'll see

with, with quantum computers. You know what we think now as a quantum

computer for most of these modalities will just be a single core.

So we'll have multiple or multiple quantum

processing units connected, networking together.

So we will build again for most of the modalities, big

quantum computers by networking small quantum computers. And

that's in the future. And that's something that will be playing out more and more

too in the next few years. So when you talk about networking, the

smaller computers, that's also

moving away from like quantum in the cloud. No,

no, it has to do with the actual quantum computer itself,

the total computer. So you can talk about

networking, if you will. Very close.

So here your model might be two chips on a motherboard,

right? That close. Or, you know, a meter

apart. You have two devices maybe that use lasers, you know, such as

the ion traps or the neutral atoms. But they're really pretty close,

right? That's small. Medium is data center distances,

right? So, so it could be 100 meters by

100 meters and somehow you have to get to that thing over there.

It, it becomes a little more complicated. And then long distance

is from here to California or here to Europe by a satellite

using quantum communications. So, so what I was

talking about really was the very close kind of

multiple QPUs, fairly together. I'm not

ruling out that maybe you might divide. You might say, well, I'm going to do

part of this on a quantum computer in New York and part in

la. Right, that could happen. But the first focus

of shared computation is very close, small. Okay,

okay. Interesting. Yeah. I think,

I think we will look back at this time with nostalgia at some point in

the future, right? Just kind of like we now look at the Pentium launch. Like

I remember when the Pentium came out, I remember the controversy about the Pentium

with the floating point thing and

how intel kind of botched the response at first.

And then, and then, you know, they, they obviously

kind of turned that around to where Pentium, Pentium was a big deal

for a long time. And I remember

feeling old when I was telling my son like, oh, you know, it was like

a Pentium, something like that. And he goes, what's a Pentium? Right.

I think we saw, we were in the computer store and we saw like it

said a celeron chip or something like that for this like super tiny

laptop. And I'm like, you know, it's like a Pentium, it's like a low powered

Pentium. And he goes, what's a Pentium? Oh, that hurt.

Well this also brings up Moore's Law, right? So again

for people who weren't there, Pentium was the name of a chip

that intel produced a cpu, a central processing

unit that were in early computers. But we've had

Moore's Law going and was certainly in full swing in the 80s and 90s,

you know. Right. Gordon Moore postulated in, in

1964 that roughly every two years

the computational power of a chip would double

18 months to two years. And, and the way he computed that was really

by the number of transistors. Right. So the number of transistors that they could

squeeze into a chip would, but also the energy

requirements would be cut in half. And a lot of people don't know about that

part. And that's why, you know,

when my first computer in the 1980s, you know, compared to now was

like nothing but it had noisy fans and things like this.

I think it was something like seven generations ago.

The iPhone at that point was a million

times more powerful than the Apollo guidance system computers.

Yeah, you know, so,

so that's why. So Pentium was just one name for a chip along

the history, but it was a breakthrough compared to what they had been doing. So

that's why a lot of us remember that name in particular. And the

same way, you know, the density, there's this term

swap C, so it's swap hyphen C. So its

size, weight and power, hyphen C for cost.

And that's maybe a little more general way of expressing what

we've talked about with Moore's Law. And this will happen with quantum too. Quantum

computers will get smaller, they'll become more powerful, right. They will

use less energy and they will cost less and that's the

computing industry, folks, right? That's the way it

works. And so again, we will, you know, we're

postulating when we look back, right, we'll say, boy, that took up a

room. Why did it take up a room? Right, Just for that.

No, I mean, it's a good point, right? And

it's. I just think that we really are in the early

stages of this quantum kind of shift to this

type of compute. And I think it's exciting because there's all sorts of

career opportunities. You had said something in the virtual green room that

I wanted to make sure we mentioned before we run out of time, which was

that you were talking, you know, what was it, you know,

teenagers that are writing quantum code. What. What was that? Exactly?

Yeah. So when, when I started

writing Dancing with Cubits, the first edition, second edition, as

I said, second and final edition came out last. Last year.

I'll tell you, I was 60 years old when I started writing the first edition.

And I started coding classically when I was 15 years

old, right, in high school and this old teletype sort of thing. So

I had decades and decades and decades of thinking about classical

computers and how one codes them. And there have

been different things through the years. And, you know, even if we get to the

point of saying, oh, Python now or C or Rust or things like

this, we've been through many programming languages,

but there are certain common things. You know, when you go to a new programming

language, you say, well, I've got to be able to do something like this. How

does this language do it? Or there's got to be something in the

library to do this sort of action. I gotta find it, right? It's not

like you're learning from scratch every single time. There

are things that you can do in

regular classical programming languages that you can't do in quantum.

You can't. You can't iterate over a loop. You can't say

purely Quantumly, do this 10 times, right?

You can copy data all you wanted that you want to do.

When you get to quantum, you find out you can't copy data.

You cannot. If I have information represented in a quantum state,

I cannot duplicate that. This is quantum

mechanics. This is not that we are incompetent.

It's impossible. It's a law of nature. It. And you

prove this by demonstrating a contradiction. It's called the no

cloning theorem. And that's in the book. Book.

And look at this and say, what do you mean you can't copy information?

I can't Put stuff in a database and pull it out. Well, you could

pull it out, but it destroys whatever was in the database, its version.

And this goes back to this notion of like teleportation, like Star

Trek. Right, right. The people get all shimmery from one place and they

appear someplace else. And you don't have to two copies of the people, you only

have one. So you've, you've got

these stark, stark differences in how you actually

code classical models in quantum. Not driven by

style. Right, right. Not driven by, oh, we're object

oriented. Right. Or things like this. In the case of quantum, by

actual physical constraints of the model of quantum mechanics.

So Jake and Beto, who leads the IBM quantum program,

years ago, when, when somebody was trying to describe something

to him, he said, you're speaking, you're thinking

too classically, meaning you're trying to come up with a

quantum solution by doing it the way you would solve a

classical problem. Right. That's not going to work. It's very different.

And I sometimes say you can be the best coder, classical coder in

the world. That doesn't mean you're going to be an amazing quantum coder automatically.

No, that's true. So what I was saying was, you know, so for people like

me, right? So as I said, I started coding when I was 15. I started

writing this book about quantum computing when I was 60.

You can do the math. I had to be very

careful and you know, and there were

errors in early drafts that I made. Right.

And just in general learning about this, and maybe this is a lesson for people

who are in quantum computing, is I'd go to bed, I say, oh,

I'm so smart. I figured this out, I completely understand this, right. And

wake up and say, I am completely wrong,

Completely wrong. And it was because using this older intuition.

So my, my point, Frank, was to say the people who don't have this

are teenagers because they don't have the decades of

quote, thinking classically. Right. To them

it's all coding and the world is the

way the world is and you learn how to do it right and things like

this and they grow up in this mixed model. Right.

I did a book between the versions of Dancing with Cubits

called Dancing with Python where I mixed this. I tried to show

how you would do both.

And so it's always a joy. And what's also a joy is

I have had 12 year olds, had really good deep

conversations about coding Quantum computing with 12 year olds, 15 year

olds, and they're not learning this in School,

they're just going out, right. They're reading books like mine and others.

They're finding things on the web so you don't have to.

For your kids, whatever. Anybody who wants to learn, you do not have to

take a class. You can if that works for you. But there's so much good

material that's out there. And so if

you will, as we all get

a little older and more younger people enter the field, much

of this stuff will seem very natural to them from the very beginning. Right.

It's not us transitioning into a quantum world. At

some point we can say, you know, they were, they were born quantum.

We used to say born out, born on the web. Right. That was an expression.

No, I think there's something to that, right? Like, you know, and

they're definitely Steve Jobs. Didn't Steve Jobs have a something about this where

people will adapt, new users will just do this and then the

old users will die off of it? He, I'm butchering the quote, but I

think so, yeah. Yeah. He says something that affect. That the market will evolve because

people. And like, you know, I was thinking about this. Was I talking to you

about this, Candace, the other day? Like, you know, if,

like when my mom was still around, she would call me

frantically every, you know, the day before the

day of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, like playing on tv, right?

And like, because back in, even when I was a kid, right, it was on

once a year and you know, if you

missed it, I mean, that was it, you missed it. Yeah, right. Whereas I

didn't have the heart to tell her that, you know, this was when my teenager

was a baby. We had it on dvd, right? And

you know, we had the penultimate thing at the time, which was the DVD in

the car, right. And now that looks, that looks

very old school, right. You know, I don't think my, certainly my three year

old has probably never seen a dvd, right? Because you know, it's streaming everything.

Stream. One of his favorite shows is the Mickey Mouse Christmas Special, right.

Which he watches nonstop, which is kind of annoying,

but, but he watches that in July, August,

September, it doesn't matter. Like he has no, there's no scarcity

in that regard, Right? That's right. And I, you know,

I don't think they understand that. Like, you know, I remember having to watch the

news, right? You had to sit through the news, half hour of like local

news to get the weather report. Like, I just want the weather. I don't want,

you know, I don't want to hear how you know, the, you know,

actually I did care about the Yankees, but like, I didn't, I don't, I don't

want to know, like, local stories about what's happening and, you know,

Queens or, you know, Long island or whatever. Like, I just wanted to know what

the stupid weather's going to be tomorrow. Yankees. Yankees are tied

for first place. Nice. That's right. That's right. With the Blue

Jays. It's going to be so exciting. I'm going to be so

conflicted. You'll be very conflicted. Yeah. I'm a born and bred New Yorker.

I only, I only came to Canada 15 years ago and

then became a Canadian citizen as well, so.

But I'm in Montreal. But still, when there's a team

in Canada, all the provinces come together.

Yep. And we all cheer and get excited. My,

I went to Fordham, which is like 30 blocks Yankee Stadium. So.

Yeah, a lot of my, A lot of my professors were adjunct professors

from IBM. I was born just north of New York

City, so. Okay. I know that area well. Candace is

from Scarsdale. Yep. I grew up in Scarsdale.

Yeah. On the train line, right? Exactly. Metro north

and the Harlem Hudson line. That's right. This is,

this is. And again, for those who made it, this is the New York City

ecosystem. Right, Right, Exactly. You know how all the trains feed

into the city and, and what were originally the bedroom communities, Right?

Yeah. You know, the suburbs, if you will. And they had different flavors to

them and maybe different financial aspects to them.

You know, just like New Jersey, if. You, if you ever meet somebody, two people

who come together from New Jersey, they'll be like, what exit?

Exactly. You know exactly where they're from. Like, it's funny, right? So I was down

in Raleigh recording, doing like studio sessions

for Red Hat. And the, you know, the

guy's like, oh, you're from Jersey? And I'm like, yeah. He's like,

whereabouts? I'm like, Exit 14, Exit 14A. And he goes, oh,

wow. From Exit 5. And like the non Jersey people in the

room had no idea. And they were like, they were remarking on that. It was

like, I know exactly where that is. I know, like, you know, I pegged the

town. And so like, I knew what town he was from. I kind of knew

what he was about. He knew where I was from, what I was about. It's.

It's a thing. And because the rail transit isn't

well developed in Jersey as it is in New York State, like, it's the same

thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. That's

cool. And all roads Canada seem to go to like the

IBM Westchester area. Right. We're

definitely talking to the right people. No, this has been absolutely fantastic.

I really enjoyed speaking with you, Bob. Same here. Really

enjoy. Where can people find out more about you and what you're up to?

So I'm on LinkedIn Robert Sutor S U T O

R you can start there. You can also go to

sutor.com that's the short version. You can see the sorts of things

we do and we publish some reports also

I want to point people. So on substack

drbobsutor.substack.com and again you can find

Sutor and substack. I started doing something several months ago

to just so I would be alerted to pretty much

every happening in the quantum industry. And I had tried Google alerts

and this, that and whatever and they help

but I was still missing things like I'm trying

so hard and this other big announcement happened and I never heard about. So being

summer, I started writing a little code and I started writing a little more code

Python code and I built an aggregator that is now looking

at over 400 RSS feeds and company

websites and this, that and whatever. And we

publish on weekdays all the latest

news we can possibly find. Let's say it's automated, you know, with a little

fix up. But you can get an email and

it'll come to you every morning except today. It's going to come as soon as

we're finished. And you can see

just the most recent announcements. Who's gotten funding, who

has gotten NSF awards, what's happening around the world, it's global.

And the reason why I'm encouraging people is because they spent an awful lot of

time writing this thing for myself initially and then I made

it available for free. Just do it, use it if you want

to, but I put a lot of effort into it so I want

people actually to read it and it will give you that digest really of

the last two days, what's happened so far today and what happened

yesterday. And it's a good way, even if you just scan it,

you'll most likely not miss any of the major movements.

Oh, very cool. We'll definitely have to put that in the show notes. And the

book once again is Dancing with Qubits. Highly recommend it.

And I'm going to pick it up and start reading it again actually. Okay.

So just so I can feel smart again. Okay, very

good. Awesome. And we'll let RAI finish the show.

And That's a wrap on this episode of Impact Quantum. Huge

thanks to Dr. Bob Souter for joining us, and

frankly, for managing to make quantum computing sound almost

cozy. We covered a lot, from the coming consolidation of

quantum hardware companies to why teenagers might just

be better quantum coders than we are. No, really,

if you've made it this far, congratulations. You are officially

more quantum curious than most. Don't forget to like,

share and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And

if you've got a green room pass lying around, maybe send

it our way. There's always more quantum chat where this came from.

Until next time, stay curious, stay skeptical,

and whatever you do, don't fall for the press release hype.

Cheers.