Jeff Cordova

Interim Head of Software Engineering, Rigetti Computing · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

12statements → 11claims → 6claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 1.92/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

4 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 9 assertions · 1 insight · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Jeff argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Cordova: Near-term quantum computers run in 100-microsecond bursts
“Unlike classical computers, which you can kind of run for days and weeks, Or in perhaps years at a time, quantum computers kind of run in bursts of a hundred microseconds.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:29 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
80% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

269 words/min while actually speaking · 17.7 um and uh per 1k words · 11.4 false starts per 1k · 33.9% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Jeff Cordova: only 4 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 4 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,548 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Jeff Cordova said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cordova: Quantum computing's hard science is solved; the remaining challenge is engineering
“The hard science problems have been solved, but how do you build a superconducting qubit, and how do you Send it a radio frequency data to program it. The hard part now is is going through all the different ways that these things can be hooked together to buil…”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:37 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Insight
Cordova: Computer scientists do not yet know all quantum-solvable problem classes
“One of the surprising aspects of quantum computing is that scientists and mathematicians and computer engineers don't really know all of the problems that can be solved by a quantum computer. We just know some of them, and that's not How classical computing wo…”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:40 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cordova: Folding@home algorithm became the primary method for protein folding
“And the interesting thing about that, at least my recollection of it, is that No one thought that algorithm would work. It didn't look anything like the previous algorithms except that it was also doing some kind of chemistry that was interesting. And then the…”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:24 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Assertion Supported
Cordova: Near-term quantum computers run in 100-microsecond bursts
“Unlike classical computers, which you can kind of run for days and weeks, Or in perhaps years at a time, quantum computers kind of run in bursts of a hundred microseconds.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:29 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cordova: Quantum computers search huge combinatorial spaces to replicate physical outcomes
“Quantum computers can actually search combinatorially a huge space for certain kinds of problems and actually find the real thing that nature would do.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:46 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Assertion Partly supported
Cordova: Superconducting quantum circuits rely on standard semiconductor fabs
“The superconducting circuits we made are using standard semiconductor manufacturing technologies.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:09 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cordova: Cloud access will rapidly yield half a dozen quantum killer apps
“Building cloud access into how you get at a quantum computer will quicken the pace at which the killer apps are found instead of there being one, like there was in the early days of the PC and electronic spreadsheet, we might see a half a dozen of them pop up …”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:44 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Assertion Supported
Cordova: Quantum computers cannot store data and function purely as compute engines
“Like, you can't actually store data on these quantum computers. They're just literally, right now, just compute engines.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:37 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Prediction Partly held up
Cordova: Quantum hardware will be hosted in cloud data centers, not on-premise
“So you never really, at least in the early days, want to ever put those things, on a customer site, you want to put them in a secure facility someplace and provide cloud access or remote access to them.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:28 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cordova: Quantum processors yield different answers on every execution run
“These quantum processors actually give you different answers every time you run them.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:08 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Assertion Supported
Cordova: Quantum Virtual Machines Can Simulate Up To 30 Qubits
“You can run a quantum virtual machine and software up to about 30 or so qubits.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:23 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing
Assertion Supported
Cordova: Quarter-sized quantum chips require refrigerator-sized cryogenic cooling infrastructure
“The quantum processor is like the size of a quarter. The rest of it's the size of two or three refrigerators to house it and keep it cool at like barely above zero degrees Kelvin.”
Jeff Cordova Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:12 a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | The Cloud Atlas to Real Quantum Computing Jan 2, 2019 11m
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