A Conversation with IonQ's Niccolo De Masi

How is quantum computing moving beyond the lab and onto a clear pathway toward commercialization? 

Discover the answer in this unique and dynamic conversation from The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed! Quantum Track Opening Keynote, Niccolo De Masi, CEO at IonQ, joins host Daniel Newman to share the critical advancements and strategic vision driving the quantum revolution.

Key takeaways include:

🔹The Current State & Future of Quantum: Explore the present landscape of quantum computing and its immense future prospects, understanding where the technology stands today and where it's headed.

🔹IonQ Leading Quantum Commercialization: How IonQ, a recognized leader in quantum computing technology, is actively spearheading the efforts to bring quantum capabilities to commercial viability.

🔹Integrating Quantum with AI Technologies: Understand the crucial intersection and strategic integration of quantum computing with AI technologies, unlocking new frontiers for intelligent systems.

🔹Navigating Quantum's Challenges & Opportunities: Gain insights into the significant challenges and vast opportunities within the rapidly evolving quantum computing space, alongside IonQ's roadmap and strategic initiatives to overcome them.

Learn more at IonQ.

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Or listen to the audio here:

Daniel Newman: Hi everyone and welcome to the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed. I'm joined today by Niccolo De Masi, CEO at IonQ for the Quantum Track opening keynote on AI and the Road to Quantum Commercialization. Niccolo, it's great to have you back.

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Niccolo De Masi: Honor and pleasure always.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, so the event is all about AI Unleashed, but you can't really say AI and look at the future without talking a little bit about quantum. So we've had a long relationship. We've known each other for a long time. You have been watching the commercialization of quantum take place. You're doing deals, you're expanding the company. Let's just start off, give us a little bit of the kind of quantum State of the Union because as AI continues to proliferate, we are seeing quantum interest growing leaps and bounds as well.

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Niccolo De Masi: It's understandable. IonQ has really led the market in terms of quantum AI. On one World Quantum Day we had an event to the NYSE back in March, April where we put out a couple papers on what we call in industrial AI. So quantum machines that we already operate partnered with a couple, let's just say manufacturing industrial companies. We showcased what we call narrow quantum commercial advantage, where we're able to improve a classical LLM, generative adversarial network by a meaningful albeit single digit percent on our current machines. We also showcased at the same event an ability to provide training data for industrial AI applications that have a lack of such training data. So already Quantum is a partner for classical LLMs and I think that what we're going to see in the coming year or two is the energy advantages of quantum as well as the unique insights that Quantum provide are going to be more and more valued.

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Daniel Newman: And you have been very focused by the way, on expanding your footprint at IonQ. I think over the last month, probably from the time that the event kicks off here. You've made a couple of deals, I think well north of a billion dollars in M&A, also some strategic partnerships around the world. Talk a little bit about how you're thinking about strategic deal making and how you're thinking, because a lot of your partnerships have been with governments who are very interested in making big investments in quantum. So give us a little bit on the M&A and then a little bit among these sort of strategic partnerships you're signing around the world.

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Niccolo De Masi: Yeah, sure. We've announced three acquisitions since I took over as CEO on February 26th. The first one was a business called LIGHTSYNC, that is a quantum memory company spun off from Harvard University. And LIGHTSYNIC actually does two things for IonQ. It supports not only the scaling of our quantum computers, which is the core business, but it also supports the extension of our quantum networking business to longer distances, which supports our quantum networking business. So all of a sudden we can go from 10 kilometer 20, 30 kilometer kind of kilometers with their technology. On the compute side, it accelerated IonQ's roadmap on its own and we closed LIGHTSYNIC just a few weeks ago Actually. We also announced the acquisition of Capella, which is a satellite signals intelligence, and we will turn it into a QKD satellite business. And the reason that's important is that it impacts ability of communications to remain secure as we go from ground to satellite, satellite to satellite and satellite to ground, which are the most vulnerable parts of the communication roadmap that we all rely upon for civilization as we know it. The third acquisition we just announced very recently, and that was Oxford Ionix on June 9th. Oxford Ionix is a biggest transaction that IonQ has ever announced in its history. It is a transformative deal for both the U.S. and the U.K. And the reason it's transformative is we're actually getting the combination of IonQ standalone plus our LIGHTSYNIC friends in Harvard, outside Harvard and Boston, plus our new friends at Oxford. And one plus one plus one is not three, it's like 30 or 300 or 3000 at the rate that we're seeing.

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Daniel Newman: Exponential.

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Niccolo De Masi: Yeah, it really is probably doubly exponential because as you know Daniel, every time we add a cube, we double the compute space. So it's not just Moore's Law where you double every 18 months. It's like we could be 200 million times bigger in 18 months. And I think that's one of the things that you may well understand in your gut a lot better than industry observers typically do, which is that humans don't have brains that understand exponentials very well. They really don't understand double exponentials. And so the difference in compute power, every generation is actually going to steepen in quantum computing and steepen at a pace that is very difficult to fathom as we go from 36 qubits to 256 to 10,000, 20,000, 200,000.

And we announced a road map on June 9th that takes us out to 2 million qubits in 2030 and 80,000 logical qubits. And we think that puts us 50 times better in logical qubits than anybody else. We think it puts us potentially billions of times faster in gate operations per clock tick than anybody else. And it really is showing that our inorganic strategy is driving synergies around the technical road map and attracting talent and enabling us to put together the pieces of scale much the way NVIDIA did when it bought Mellanox in 2020, right? So LIGHTSYNC is our Mellanox deal for quantum computing. It's just that it's about photon memory and photon entanglement, quantum memory as opposed to just data center expansion.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, well, the talent in this particular space is exponential in itself. We've seen across the AI space, the race for talent. You hear stories about Meta tracing $2 million research engineers and losing because they want to go work for something. I think there's going to be a very similar but actually maybe even more challenging talent race in quantum because the number of the quantum physicists and engineers that are going to be available to help solve these problems are going to be pretty limited. I do think it's also worth pointing out, I think the billion dollar deal you did just over a billion dollar is the largest quantum deal in the space to date. There has not been a deal of this size yet, so you also broke ground in terms of crossing the 10 zero club. So congratulations on that as well. So talk a little bit about the relationship with Quantum and ai. You've made a few parallels throughout this conversation. I like the one about the Nvidia network quantum network, but I think sometimes it gets a little bit lost because people want to compare these things somewhat discreetly like is it quantum or is it ai? And just like we found with classical computing and quantum, the relationship is more symbiotic. In the AI compute era, there's got to be almost an exponential double, triple exponential impact that could be expected over time when the two things actually work synergistically.

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Niccolo De Masi: Yeah, no, well said. Look, yesterday on June 9th, we also announced a 20 x speed up in partnership with Nvidia and AstraZeneca and Amazon AWS around computational drug design. And so we're turning months into days. I can't stress that enough. It's a combination of a quantum computer on the loop with classical workflow in combination have allowed us to effectively do something in days that normally takes months. And I would say that that's going to have a huge impact on humanity. Your ability to drive more early discovery and early, let's just say investigative work around potential clinical paths and potential candidates to be drugs, is going to expand the pipeline, expand the top of funnel if you will. And we're just getting started, right? It's an AQ-36 system. It will be much more powerful. Every generation henceforth, hundreds of millions, even billions of times more powerful in the coming years as we move from early commercial advantage today through to early fault tolerance, through to full fault tolerance.

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And so I think you're spot on there. We look at this as quantum expanding the overall compute market and were going to expanding the pie and addressing problems that can't be solved otherwise as well as making all of this happen with a much lower ratio of compute success to energy. We are, Microsoft is recommissioning Three Mile Island to power their data centers and that is kind of a sad day for humanity. We are not in need of that. Our systems plug into a wall socket. I like to remind people, Daniel, that the human brain, at least in my estimate, is probably a quantum computer of sorts for two reasons. One, it only uses five milliamps of power. It doesn't need a nuclear power plant. Two, it learns much faster on less training data. One of the things I'm always amazed by, you have kids and so you remember your kids when they were six months old, a year old, 18 months old. I was always marveling at my own daughters who could look at a new object in a book, learn the name of it, car train, plane, whatever. 

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And then you'd go outside and they could point at that object if it happened to come across their worldview. And that's amazing on one piece of data. I mean we have to show chat, LLM's know millions and gazillions of pieces of data to train them on what an airplane looks like, 2D to 3D real life. And so look, at the end of the day, this is the biggest revolution in computing in 80 years, right? We're moving from classical to quantum. They're going to run along alongside each other for a long time. We're going to do pieces of problems that are just not solvable by classical computers either ever or in a time horizon that is relevant to create value. And over time, the energy advantages will allow us to nibble on more of the GPU space. But I think right now, the next few years is all about exponential growth and what Congress can do and exponential growth in the partnerships between us and LMS to make LLM AI quantum AI breakthroughs happen that no one's even thought of.

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Daniel Newman: And I think the one thing for our audience that's really important to understand is each type of computing does different things really well. So the CPU era of computing, running traditional applications, running your ERP system, that is not something you'd want to do with a quantum computer, by the way. It's not something you'd want to do with a GPU AI system either.

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Niccolo De Masi: That's right.

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Daniel Newman: AI computers are done specifically developed for certain things. You were hearing a lot of at this event about there's the pre-training error, certain types of compute parallel processing because you need those trillions of tokens, for instance, on the inference side or on the training side, you need to see tons and tons of data for it to learn and become useful. Quantum, like you said, needs less, potentially, data can do more with it, but it's for specific kind of applications. So it sounds like everything's very symbiotic. Now, you kind of started going down this path Niccolo, and I think it's really a great way to end this conversation is the debate is always commercialization. The debate is always when does it become less academic? And a big part of your recent talk track has been that's now. But then if that is now, how fast does it, if our kids do go to college, if college is a thing, when your kids, my kids, my younger kids, my older ones are already there, are they going to be playing with, is the average student going to be playing with a quantum computer? What is the kind of pace that we start to see with these next wave of breakthroughs?

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Niccolo De Masi: Yeah, look, you started this conversation on partnerships and I'll bring us right back to that, which is governments and Fortune 500 companies want the IonQ ecosystem. And the reason they want it is they want a future-proof job creation, want a future-proof universities learning, they want a future-proof research and entrepreneurs starting companies. And we have, I would argue that the leading ecosystem in quantum networking and quantum computing working together at IonQ, not only symbiotically between the quantum businesses, but also branching out into working with the GPU, LLM and CPU ecosystem. And so I absolutely think, look, Mellanox was bought by Nvidia in 2020, so people said something similar in 2020 that Nvidia is an interesting company, it's kind of a GPU graphic process game company. And then ChatGPT went from curiosity to hobby to, "Oh, goodness gracious, there's something happening here."

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And so I think we're on a similar time horizon. You're going to see the inflection in quantum computing happen in quarters and very low single digit years. And you're going to see it open up a world whereby, yes, I think five years from today, three years from today, certainly when you're younger, when in college, certainly quantum computing is on the curriculum. Look, I'm a physicist originally Daniel, and when I look at old university entrance exams at Cambridge University where I went to school, they didn't have any quantum on it 40 years ago, 30 years, but 30 years before I went to school, there was no quantum on the roadmap for getting to Cambridge. I couldn't do those exam papers, by the way, when I took them because we learned a bunch of quantum stuff that the guys in the sixties didn't because it was too new a theory.

We're another 30 years on from that, right? 

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So you're going to school in the 2020s in 2030s. Quantum is most of what matters. If you're a physicist, not a small part of it. It's most of what matters. And I am really excited about the proliferation of technology. When we IPO'd four and a half, five years ago, quantum was very much a frontier of science Today, it's an early adopter business that every Fortune 500 CEO has a strategy around. And frankly, every large government agency has a strategy around as well. And that's big progress in four years, four and a half years. Imagine we're the next 2, 3, 4, 4 and a half years is going to bring us. Exponential deepening of that ecosystem and exponential inclusion of more industries, consumers, researchers, students in our ecosystem as well.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, I feel like the title, this opening session here in our quantum track is going to need to be something about double, triple exponential. But your final question to go on the way out, Nicholas, can a quantum computer help a guy like me grow his hair back?

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Niccolo De Masi: It might, it might Daniel. It actually might. We're really heartened by how successful we are at modeling molecules for both chemistry, material science and pharmaceutical purposes. And we're also good at topological data analysis. So when I look at Alzheimer's cures and cocktail approaches to solving something, I think we can help with a cocktail approach to that, Daniel. Topological data analysis. I think we can help with molecular modeling early on. We can explore more pathways that can individualize perhaps treatment of making your head look more like mine. And the reality is we're just getting started. So as quantum companies become bigger, we'll be able to model larger molecules and more pathways faster. Because at the end of the day, molecules are a quantum process. They're not a classical process. They're like the very embodiment of a quantum process. So a lot coming here in the chemistry and pharmaceutical space,

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Daniel Newman: I'd love to see us tackle Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and some much more complicated, much more degenerative type of diseases immediately and more quickly. I tell you what, I think I pull this, Paul, look off pretty well. Niccolo De Masi, CEO IonQ, thank you so much for helping us open up our Quantum track here at the Six Five Summit. Look forward to chatting with you again soon.

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Niccolo De Masi: My pleasure. Thanks so much.

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Daniel Newman: Everybody stay with us, stay connected with us on social and explore more conversations at sixfivemedia.com/summit. Stay tuned for more in-depth conversations where we bring you the next generation insights.

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