2025 Nobel Laureate John Martinis explains why he left UC Santa Barbara to head Google's quantum computing team in 2014.
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.”
Prediction Not 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.”
Assertion Supported
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 …”
Assertion Supported
Martinis: Google's 53-qubit experiment successfully demonstrated quantum supremacy
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Martinis: General-purpose quantum computers will require one million qubits
“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…”
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.”