John Martinis, 2025 Nobel Laureate in Physics and former head of Google's Quantum AI team, outlines the qubit scale needed for general-purpose quantum computing versus today's state-of-the-art systems.
“And because of that, you're talking about a million qubit quantum computers to be general purpose and solve really hard problems. There might be some million. A million is a good round number for it. Maybe a little bit more. And right now we're at, you know, a hundred or, you know, a little bit more than that.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from John Martinis
Opinion
Martinis: Current quantum computers are not big or reliable enough yet
“They aren't really big enough to be useful yet. They have to get bigger, and they have to get better. Less noise.”
John MartinisOct 27, 2025▶ 37:14Nobel Prize in Physics Winner: The Quantum Leap That Changed Everything - John Martinis
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Martinis: Useful quantum computers will arrive in 8 to 10 years
“And what we want to do, and it's a timeline of many other groups, is to do something in, let's say in the next eight, 10 years, something like that.”
John MartinisOct 27, 2025▶ 37:46Nobel Prize in Physics Winner: The Quantum Leap That Changed Everything - John Martinis
AssertionSupported
Martinis: Chinese researchers successfully replicated Google's quantum supremacy experiment
“When I have read the papers that duplicated what we did at Google, On the quantum supremacy experiment. You know, they know what they're doing. I mean, they go through the theory, they talk about, a lot of it is very similar to what we're doing, but they know …”
John MartinisOct 27, 2025▶ 41:17Nobel Prize in Physics Winner: The Quantum Leap That Changed Everything - John Martinis
“We published this quantum supremacy experiment with 53 qubits, where we made a lot of qubits, and we made them really good, and, you know, fast and whatever, so that we could run some algorithm, mathematical algorithm, that what, we produced some output that w…”
John MartinisOct 27, 2025▶ 29:50Nobel Prize in Physics Winner: The Quantum Leap That Changed Everything - John Martinis
Disclosure
Martinis: China lacks access to the 300mm fabrication tools for quantum
“We're going to be using applied materials and the modern fabrication processes that they have, which on 300 millimeter tools, you know, you can't get in China, for example.”
John MartinisOct 27, 2025▶ 42:55Nobel Prize in Physics Winner: The Quantum Leap That Changed Everything - John Martinis
Disclosure
Martinis: Google offered the funding and retention needed for quantum hardware
“Although academia was great, it would be hard to get the team together and keep them together for a long time to build this complicated machine, and Google had the money, ok?”
John MartinisOct 27, 2025▶ 29:19Nobel Prize in Physics Winner: The Quantum Leap That Changed Everything - John Martinis
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 460 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.