Is AI the Missing Piece for Quantum Computers? | Isaiah Hull, FirstQFM (Startup Series #5)

Send us Fan MailBlond & Quantum Episode 18: Asia's quantum race: who's buying and why | Rizwan Hussain, Head of Quantum Sales, Asia Pacific & Japan at IBMThere is no chief quantum officer yet. So who actually signs off on a quantum deal? According to Rizwan Hussain, it happens at the very top: the CEO and chief strategy officer in a company, the chancellor at a university, sometimes the prime minister of a country.Rizwan leads quantum sales for IBM across Asia Pacific and Japan and is an IBM Quantum Distinguished Ambassador. After 21 years at IBM, helping build its Smarter Cities business and now its quantum business in the region, he spends his days in boardrooms and government offices explaining why quantum matters now. He also teaches the Quantum Opportunities Sprint, an executive program with the University of Sydney, and he has finished the Ultraman three times.What we cover:Why executives worry less about ROI than about a missed market opportunityWho makes the decision, and why there is no chief quantum officer yetWhich industries are moving first, globally and in Asia PacificWhy Japan leads the region, and how South Korea, India, Singapore and Australia followSovereign quantum: strategic need or glitz and glamour?On-premise vs. cloud, and why RIKEN wanted a quantum system next to FugakuWhat quantum advantage means, and IBM's commitment to demonstrate it in 2026IBM's $10 billion investment and the road to fault tolerance by 2029Quantum and AI: competing for budget, or complementary?Why it matters: most conversations about quantum start with the physics. This one starts with the buyer. If you lead a business, advise a government or invest in this market, Rizwan's view of who is buying, what they want the system for and where the money is going is a practical map of how quantum is being adopted today. He is also candid about what isn't there yet, including use cases in agriculture and the brain drain from Australia.Blond & Quantum is hosted by Eva Galant. Each episode features a leader from the quantum ecosystem — researchers, founders, and investors — for a laid-back conversation about how quantum technology is shaping the world without the equations. New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Support the show

Send us Fan MailBlond & Quantum Episode 17: One cracked key and every bank site looks real — why "harvest now, forge later" may come first | Konstantinos Karagiannis, Senior Director of Quantum Computing Services at ProtivitiEveryone worries that a quantum computer will one day read our encrypted messages. Konstantinos Karagiannis thinks the first real attack will look very different. If an early machine needs about five days to crack a single key, that's roughly 73 attacks a year. Would you spend them reading old emails? Or crack one hardware maker's signing key and push malware every laptop trusts — or a certificate authority's, and make a fake bank site look perfectly real?Konstantinos leads quantum computing services at Protiviti and hosts The Post-Quantum World, which he believes is the longest continuously running quantum podcast. He has spoken at DEF CON on everything from attacking Ethereum smart contracts to "Post-Quantum Panic," the talk that went viral and became his upcoming Wiley book of the same name.Listen to find out:📍 How the qubits needed to break RSA-2048 fell from about a billion to around 100,000 — and why the floor may be lower still📍 The "crisscross" that defines Q-Day: falling qubit requirements meeting rising hardware roadmaps📍 Harvest now, forge later: why forged signatures, not decrypted messages, may be the first quantum attack📍 Why he sees 2029 as the first year a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is possible📍 What he finds inside real organizations: hard-coded keys, undocumented root CAs and hardware that will have to be ripped and replaced📍 How quantum could hit Bitcoin, and why he believes the market wouldn't survive a proven attack📍 Where AI already helps (cryptographic discovery, AlphaQubit) and where it gets dangerous (compliance attestations no human can audit)📍 What companies should do now: crypto agility, PQC readiness and quantum-inspired tensor networksWhy it matters: every organization will have to migrate to post-quantum cryptography, and most haven't started. Konstantinos's point is that the quantum threat isn't only about secrets being read years from now. It's about trust itself being forged.Guest: Konstantinos Karagiannis is Senior Director of Quantum Computing Services at Protiviti, where he helps organizations prepare for post-quantum cryptography and explore quantum use cases. He studied at Polytechnic in Brooklyn, spent years in cryptography and financial-systems security research, gave his first keynote on quantum key distribution in 2012, and hosts The Post-Quantum World. His book Post-Quantum Panic is due from Wiley on World Quantum Day, April 14, 2027.Blond & Quantum is hosted by Eva Galant. Each episode features a leader from the quantum ecosystem — researchers, founders, and investors — for a laid-back conversation about how quantum technology is shaping the world without the equations. New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CA-UwAkUuyYSupport the show

Send us Fan MailBlond & Quantum Episode 14: Why 99.9% fidelity isn't good enough — Diraq's silicon bet | Arne Laucht, Head of Technical Partnerships at DiraqA quantum computer that gets 999 operations right out of every thousand sounds excellent. Until it has to run a million of them in a row. Arne Laucht, Head of Technical Partnerships at Diraq and Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney, explains why that one error in a thousand is the whole story in quantum computing, and why Diraq is betting that the answer is the same silicon that sits in your phone.Diraq builds qubits from the spin of single electrons inside silicon, made on standard semiconductor production lines. Arne's case is simple: other approaches reach a million qubits by filling a warehouse with cryostats. Diraq wants to fit them on a single chip, in a single cryostat, running at about one kelvin.Arne's path runs from photonic crystal quantum optics in Munich, to a postdoc in Sydney fifteen years ago, to Andrew Dzurak's silicon group at UNSW, and into Diraq as one of its first people, where he led quantum measurement before moving to the US to run the company's technical partnerships.Listen to find out:📍 What a silicon spin qubit is, and why the electron's spin beats its charge📍 Why 99.9% fidelity still isn't enough when a real calculation needs millions of operations📍 Physical vs. logical qubits, and why raw qubit counts are one of the most misleading numbers in quantum📍 The three places quantum computing could matter (science, defense, commercial) and why cost decides which one you end up in📍 Why running at one kelvin instead of millikelvin changes the economics of scaling📍 What Diraq's 300 mm result with imec means, and why reproducibility beats a single record number📍 What it took to make the case to DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, and how Diraq sizes up Intel and HRL📍 The one metric Arne wants investors to watch: price per computationWhy it matters: silicon spin is the bet that quantum computing can ride the same manufacturing curve that made classical chips cheap. If it works, the winning machine won't be the one with the most qubits. It will be the one that can run a useful algorithm at a price a business is willing to pay.Guest: Arne Laucht is Head of Technical Partnerships at Diraq, the UNSW Sydney spin-out building silicon spin-qubit quantum processors on standard CMOS manufacturing lines, and an Associate Professor at UNSW. He did his PhD in physics in Munich, moved to Sydney as a postdoc, and was previously Diraq's Head of Quantum Measurement.Blond & Quantum is hosted by Eva Galant. Each episode features a leader from the quantum ecosystem — researchers, founders, and investors — for a laid-back conversation about how quantum technology is shaping the world without the equations. New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/So1QUree6i4Support the show

Send us Fan MailBlond & Quantum Episode 16: Quantum sensors that navigate without GPS | Dr. Karsten Pyka, Lead Technology Development – Quantum Sensing at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), Abu DhabiWhat happens to navigation when GPS goes dark? Dr. Karsten Pyka builds the quantum sensors designed for exactly that moment. At TII's Quantum Research Center in Abu Dhabi, his team is developing a levitated-particle inertial sensor — a tiny test mass floating in ultra-high vacuum — that tracks motion so precisely you can follow your own trajectory with no satellites, no signal and no GPS.Karsten's path runs from optical clocks and ion traps in Braunschweig and Hannover, to quantum simulation in Sydney, to automotive innovation and satellite systems engineering at OHB in Munich, and finally to Abu Dhabi in 2021, where he and his wife — also a quantum physicist — joined a brand-new quantum center on day one.Listen to find out:📍 How a quantum inertial sensor works, explained with a lamp, a moving room and a crowd throwing tennis balls📍 Why GPS-free navigation, vibration sensing and geological monitoring are the first realistic markets for quantum sensing📍 What optical clocks are, and why the definition of the second may soon move from cesium to light📍 How the UAE's Advanced Technology Research Council and TII fit into Abu Dhabi's push to diversify into deep tech📍 Which quantum sensing claim makes him roll his eyes: the quantum radar📍 Why systems thinking, learned in satellite engineering, is the skill that carries across physics, industry and quantum📍 What's next at TII: navigation built on quantum magnetic sensorsWhy it matters: quantum computing gets the headlines, but quantum sensing is where quantum technology is closest to real products. Navigation that doesn't depend on satellites is a question of resilience for aviation, shipping, defense and critical infrastructure, and the Gulf is investing to be part of that answer.Guest: Dr. Karsten Pyka leads technology development in quantum sensing at the Technology Innovation Institute's Quantum Research Center in Abu Dhabi. He holds a PhD in ion-trap physics and optical clocks, did his postdoc in quantum simulation in Sydney, and worked in automotive innovation and as a systems engineer at OHB before joining TII in 2021.Blond & Quantum is hosted by Eva Galant. Each episode features a leader from the quantum ecosystem — researchers, founders, and investors — for a laid-back conversation about how quantum technology is shaping the world without the equations. New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Xet5wXJYFeUSupport the show

Send us Fan MailBlond & Quantum start-up series episode 7: The tiny chips protecting banks, hospitals and governments  | Francesco Raffaelli | CTO at KETS Quantum Security.We asked a quantum security CTO where he wants his technology to be in ten years.He said he would like you not to see it at all.Francesco Raffaelli is CTO of KETS Quantum Security in Bristol, and he builds quantum key distribution onto silicon chips. His reasoning is a business argument, not a physics one: conventional QKD is assembled from discrete fibre-optic components, and "it would take a day to set up one, and a thousand days to set up a thousand." Put it on a photonic integrated circuit made in a standard semiconductor foundry, and volume becomes a repeat order.Which leads to the least glamorous and most important slide in quantum security: nobody is going to let a vendor install a standalone box inside their telecom infrastructure. So KETS is not selling boxes. It is selling a card the size of a laptop that slots into equipment that already exists, sharing the power supply and the fibre already running through it.In this episode with Eva Galant:📍 Why post-quantum cryptography will cover most of the world — and why banks, grids and hospitals will still want a hardware layer underneath it📍 The cleanest framing of the whole debate we have heard: "Quantum computers attack software. QKD lives in optical fibres."📍 Why he says quantum computing is supported massively in the UK, and quantum key distribution is not📍 Why the chip is no longer the most expensive part of his system — and what that tells investors📍 Satellite links, and the QKD transmitter they flew on a droneThank you, Francesco, for an hour of straight answers — including the ones about your own industry's gaps.#QuantumComputing #DeepTech #QuantumTechnology #BlondAndQuantum #QKD #CybersecuritySupport the show

Send us Fan MailBlond & Quantum Episode 12: Einstein was wrong — and onto something fantastic | Prof. Alain Aspect. Nobel Prize winner in Physics 2022 Co-founder of PasqalProfessor Alain Aspect won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 for proving entanglement is real — after being warned the work would destroy his career. He tells Eva Galant why the switch that made his experiment possible came out of a student debate, how Pasqal started inside his own institute, why he would put his bet on quantum at fifty per cent, and why "you cannot really accelerate basic ideas just by dumping money on it."He has also written the book for anyone who wants the long version of this story: "Si Einstein avait su", It will published in English from MIT Press as "If Einstein Had Known" very soon.Listen to find out:📍Why the first question John Bell asked me was not about physics. It was whether I had a permanent position.📍 Why he told me to publish my idea rather than keep it secret — and why that mattered forty years later.📍 Why the switch itself — the piece I had to invent to make Bell's suggestion possible — came out of a debate between my students and not out of the lab. I love teaching, and I am not sure I would have found it otherwise.📍 Why you cannot really accelerate basic ideas just by dumping money on them — and why I am nonetheless enthusiastic about the link between academic research and startups.📍Why, if I had to bet on quantum computing, I would say fifty per cent — and why I fully disagree with colleagues who say it will never work.🎙️ Guest: Prof. Alain Aspect | Nobel Prize winner in Physics 2022. Co-founder of Pasqal🎧 Host: Eva Galant | Blond & Quantum#QuantumComputing #DeepTech #VentureCapital #BlondAndQuantum #Entanglement #QuantumTechnologySupport the show

Send us Fan MailBlond & Quantum Episode 11: Someone is stealing your data right now to decrypt it later | Dr. Yaakov Weinstein, Chief Scientist Officer for Quantum Technologies at MITREEveryone in quantum will give you a date. Dr. Yaakov Weinstein gives you a graph. As Chief Scientist Officer for Quantum Technologies at MITRE — tells the U.S. Department of Defense, the intelligence community and DHS what in quantum is real and what is marketing — he joins Eva Galant on Blond & Quantum to explain why MITRE's public report puts the breaking of RSA-2048 in 2055–2060, and why the most useful thing you can hand a decision-maker is a number that carries no hype.Listen to find out:📍 Quantum error correction explained using one word — “yes” — and why measurement is the thing that makes it hard📍 Why the man with ~3,000 citations in error correction wonders whether the codes are too fancy, and whether we should just build better qubits instead📍 The RSA-2048 graph: built entirely from the companies' own published metrics, shown to those companies, and why nobody argues with the data — only about who will break the trend📍 “My job would be easier if the word ‘breakthrough’ wasn't attached to everything” — how to separate real signal from quarterly announcements📍 The most underrated field in quantum — sensors — and what he means by “practicing quantum”From a whim application to MIT in the 1990s, when the entire quantum community fit into one room and he knew everyone in it, to advising U.S. federal agencies — a clear-eyed look at what's real, what's hype, and what the numbers actually say.🎙️ Guest: Dr. Yaakov Weinstein | Chief Scientist Officer for Quantum Technologies at MITRE Corporation🎧 Host: Eva Galant | Blond & Quantum#QuantumComputing #PostQuantumCryptography #QuantumErrorCorrection #MITRE #RSA2048 #Cybersecurity #quantumsafe #blondandquantumSupport the show

Send us Fan MailReza Nejabati, Head of Quantum Research at Cisco, joins Eva Galant on Blond & Quantum to pull back the curtain on the part of quantum most people never hear about — not the race to build a quantum computer, but the network that has to connect them before any of it becomes useful.Cisco built the pipes that made the internet possible. Now Reza — a former Bristol chair professor on his second leap from academia to industry — is trying to repeat that success for the quantum era. The twist: Cisco deliberately won't chase QPUs. Instead, it's going full-stack on quantum networking, building hardware, protocols, and applications because, as Reza puts it, almost nobody else is.In this episode: 📍 Why "building the pipes" is the smartest seat at the quantum table — and why Cisco stays modality-agnostic 📍 The 2-million-entangled-photons-per-second chip, and why that rate is the key to beating quantum fragility 📍 The Quantum Switch, Quantum Alert, Quantum Sync and Compiler — what they do, and why the Switch matters most 📍 The Cisco–IBM partnership: who brings what, the hardest technical hurdle, and that early-2030s target 📍 Straight talk on the hype, post-quantum cryptography, and which industries actually move first 📍 The human payoff Reza is chasing: a personalized drug, simulated in weeks, delivered affordablyA grounded, jargon-free conversation on what's real, what's overhyped, and what arrives by 2030.🎙️ Guest: Professor Reza Nejabati | Head of Quantum Research at Cisco🎧 Host: Eva Galant | Blond & QuantumEnjoying Blond & Quantum? Follow the show and share this episode — more conversations with global quantum leaders are on the way.Support the show

Send us Fan MailMost quantum podcasts talk about physics. This one talks about money.Pouya Dianat, Chief Revenue Officer of Quantum Computing Inc., joins Eva Galant on Blond & Quantum to pull back the curtain on the business side of quantum — the part most people never hear about.Listen to find out: 📍 Why cryogenics makes enterprise buyers think twice 📍 The 1.5B in cash 📍 How QCI is de-risking quantum (beyond just computing) 📍 What happens if quantum doesn't deliver by 2030 📍 Photonics explained for a curious 12-year-oldNo PhD required. Just honest talk about building a quantum business.🎙️ Guest: Pouya Dianat | CRO, Quantum Computing Inc. 🎧 Host: Eva | Blond & QuantumIf you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and share — more conversations with global quantum leaders are coming soon. #quantumcomputing #QCI #photonics #quantumbusiness #deeptech #blondandquantum #crypto #quantumrevenue #TFLN #publiccompanySupport the show

Send us Fan MailDr. Bert de Jong, Director of the Quantum Systems Accelerator at Berkeley National Lab, joins Eva Galant on Blond & Quantum to pull back the curtain on the part of quantum most people never hear about — the national labs quietly driving the science before any startup ever touches it.We treat quantum like it's coming. Dr. Bert de Jong says it's been here the whole time  every chip in your phone already runs on quantum mechanics. What's changed is that we can finally use it in new ways.As Director of the Quantum Systems Accelerator at Berkeley National Lab, Bert leads one of the country's largest quantum efforts from inside a $1.5B, 4,200-person institution that lives somewhere between a university and a startup. In this conversation with Eva, he breaks down what that actually means — and where quantum is genuinely heading.In this episode: 📍 What a US National Lab really is, and how Berkeley's 16+ Nobel legacy still shapes the science 📍 Why the lab deliberately backs neutral atoms, trapped ions, and superconducting qubits — and which Bert expects to arrive first 📍 The near-term reality: industry-relevant simulations in 3–5 years, starting with chemistry, materials, and optimization 📍 Why the story is bigger than computing — quantum sensing for GPS-free navigation, secure networking, and the race to stay quantum-safe 📍 How Berkeley's incubator turns researchers into founders, and the moonshot keeping Bert up at night: zero-energy fresh water from the seaA grounded, jargon-free look at what's real, what's hype, and what's three years away.🎙️ Guest: Dr. Bert de Jong | Director, Quantum Systems Accelerator, Berkeley National Lab 🎧 Host: Eva | Blond & QuantumEnjoying Blond & Quantum? Follow the show and share this episode — more conversations with global quantum leaders are on the way.#quantumcomputing #berkeleylab #quantumsystemsaccelerator #neutralatoms #quantumsensing #deeptech #nationallab #quantumchemistry #blondandquantum #scientificdiscoverySupport the show