Why One VC Thinks Quantum Is a Bigger Unlock Than AGI

Depending on how you think about it, there’s half a dozen or more approaches to the hardware. And I became excited that within the hardware approach, the neutral atom approach was high potential. So we backed [Thompson’s] company called Logiqal.

What happens if you’re right?

I’m a venture investor, and we believe in convexity—taking risks on things that most likely won’t work, but if they do work could be 500x in value.

It’s a real earth-moving innovation if there’s a chance that quantum computers find the path toward success. You unlock these thinking engines, these computational engines that can run the future of material sciences, the future of pharmaceutical innovation, the future of logistics, the future of financial markets in ways that we’ve never seen before.

You can see a future where you could create pharmaceutical advancements that could elongate life 20 to 30 years. You could see changes in material sciences where we could invent new products. It could help us get to Mars! That is what quantum computing unlocks.

The way you talk about quantum computing sounds a lot like how many AI enthusiasts talk about artificial general intelligence.

In many ways, quantum is today where AI was back in 2015, which is a lot of really big research and science projects and starting to have practical applications rather than just pure research.

You mentioned that it’s hard to fake being a quantum expert. I would posit that it is not as hard to fake being an AI expert. How do you decide who to back?

There are so many companies that are being built and born in AI that when you extrapolate them 5, 10 years will not have a true genuine moat outside of brand or speed. Brand and speed are rarely strong enough moats to build a generational company.

I’ll give you an example. BrightAI creates stickers that are roughly this big [she makes a circle with her fist]. The company puts a sticker on every telephone pole, on every HVAC system, on every water line system, and then observes it for long periods of time, 5, 10, 15, 20 years [and flags potential issues]. That’s a pretty good moat. You’re not ripping all those stickers off.

For the most part, the value in AI accrues to the incumbents. Penny, my cofounder, is on the board of Microsoft. If you think about it, Microsoft and Google—Google has 3 billion users. Microsoft has a billion users. They can launch a product that is OK, not excellent, and they still have a pricing power, a distribution power. And so we very much think about the world where when the elephants dance. Don’t be an ant.

How do you use AI?

For everything. There’s nothing you don’t use AI for, nothing. From every question, I mean, today I probably used it 25 times.

It’s replaced Google for you?

Everything. Everything. Deep research, sourcing. Today I was looking up what jobs are declining fastest in the world. Truly, I would say it’s not a dozen times a day. It’s dozens of times a day.

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