Prediction Held up AI assessment confidence: 90% certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Shadbolt: Quantum commercial adoption will precede cryptographic security risks

Pete Shadbolt · Raising $2 Billion to Become the SpaceX of Quantum | PsiQuantum's Pete Shadbolt · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Sep 10, 2025 · at 1:22:35

Pete Shadbolt, co-founder and CSO of PsiQuantum, explains why commercial viability in quantum computing will emerge before dangerous code-breaking capabilities.

0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.5s
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“You should get like an economic early warning sign essentially where you should see quantum computing companies Doing commercially impactful things, making money, and then eventually scaling towards systems that are big enough to be cryptographically relevant.”

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 Pete Shadbolt

Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2030
Shadbolt: One-million-qubit quantum computer will outperform all global conventional compute
“A single million qubit quantum computer would outperform The net total of conventional computing on the entire planet. So you take all of the supercomputers on the planet, you take every AWS system, every Azure system, you add them all together, and we trash t…”
Pete Shadbolt Sep 10, 2025 ▶ 29:25 Raising $2 Billion to Become the SpaceX of Quantum | PsiQuantum's Pete Shadbolt · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shadbolt: Useful quantum computing requires roughly one million qubits
“The general consensus is that you need more like a million qubits to do anything commercially impactful with a quantum computer.”
Pete Shadbolt Sep 10, 2025 ▶ 6:38 Raising $2 Billion to Become the SpaceX of Quantum | PsiQuantum's Pete Shadbolt · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Disclosure
Shadbolt: PsiQuantum's million-qubit bet relies entirely on existing semiconductor fabs
“The only reason that we could afford to make that really extreme bet that we're going to go straight to a million qubits. The only reason that we felt that was plausible is that our technology fits into the fabs and the OSATs and the contract contract manufact…”
Pete Shadbolt Sep 10, 2025 ▶ 14:52 Raising $2 Billion to Become the SpaceX of Quantum | PsiQuantum's Pete Shadbolt · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Insight
Shadbolt: Quantum will parallel AI's sudden breakthrough via hardware and architecture
“It was really the convergence of two things to my mind the availability of hardware that was built for another purpose in this case, gaming GPUs, and then also progress on the architecture where I see very strong parallels between what we've done and what has …”
Pete Shadbolt Sep 10, 2025 ▶ 18:36 Raising $2 Billion to Become the SpaceX of Quantum | PsiQuantum's Pete Shadbolt · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2030
Shadbolt: Quantum computers will solve simulations impossible on classical supercomputers
“Our conventional supercomputers suck at predicting the properties of these microscopic things. And that happens to be exactly the set of problems where a quantum computer is perfectly suited and where we will solve problems that can never be solved by any conv…”
Pete Shadbolt Sep 10, 2025 ▶ 24:25 Raising $2 Billion to Become the SpaceX of Quantum | PsiQuantum's Pete Shadbolt · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shadbolt: Semiconductor industry and PsiQuantum use almost no AI in chip design
“We basically don't use AI at all inside the company to design chips. And I think if you go and look at people who are building millions of chips in industry, there's a very small amount of AI, if any, that's being involved in the actual design of those chips t…”
Pete Shadbolt Sep 10, 2025 ▶ 34:01 Raising $2 Billion to Become the SpaceX of Quantum | PsiQuantum's Pete Shadbolt · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
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