(Preview) Google’s Willow Chip, Drones as a Platform and Anduril Follow-Up, Building Inside and Outside Silicon Valley

A high level read on Google's quantum computing announcement and Google's R&D efforts generally, a listener's question about drones as a platform, follow-up on last week's conversation about Anduril and the future of the U. S. defense industry, and questions on the near term concerns surrounding an AI Manhattan project, Clayton Christensen’s theory of integration and modularity as applied to Silicon Valley, and housing prices in the Bay Area.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:09Andrew Sharp?

  Ben, how you doing?

• 0:11Ben Thompson?

  Doing well, Andrew. How are you?

• 0:13Andrew Sharp?

  I'm doing alright. How are you feeling on the way into the Bucks-Thunder Cup game on Tuesday night? Do you want to call your shot here?

• 0:20Ben Thompson?

  Well, I mean, you know, someone's got to be the first to win both the NBA Cup, the NBA Finals. So if it needs to be the Bucks, I'm happy to support that outcome.

• 0:30Andrew Sharp?

  I love to see it. I love that energy out of you. Much better energy than we had to begin the season here. So hopefully Dame and Giannis can keep the good times rolling on Tuesday night in Las Vegas. But that's not where we're going to be today. We're going to start with quantum computing, Ben. This is going to be a little bit of a new leaf for us to turn over.

• 0:50Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, maybe we should talk some more about basketball.

• 0:53Andrew Sharp?

  Let's just dive into hoops for the next hour. Chris says, "Could you take a moment to explain Google's new Willow chip and quantum computing? There seems to be a lot of hype surrounding Google's recent announcement, but I can't make heads or tails of what the real world implications are." And Ben, just to frame this for anyone in the audience who's not familiar with Google's Willow chip or what the announcement was, I'll read a portion of Google's blog post from last week. This is from Hartmut Nevin, who leads the quantum computing team out at Google. "Today, I'm delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip.

• 1:33Andrew Sharp?

  Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements. The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years. Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years, a number that vastly exceeds the age of the universe."

• 2:10Andrew Sharp?

  Log post, they write this mind boggling, this mind boggling number exceeds known time scales in physics and lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. So Ben, what do you think? Are we living in a multiverse here? We can start there.

• 2:35Ben Thompson?

  That feels like an unnecessary addition. I mean, let's just say up top, we may be better placed to be talking about Qbert. Uh, this sort of arcade game from the eighties. That was, that was a favorite of mine. I believe I-

• 2:49Andrew Sharp?

  A tad before my time, but I could fake it on Qbert. I don't know if we're talking quantum mechanics. I didn't have time to audit quantum mechanics over the weekend, but we'll give it our best shot here.

• 3:00Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. Well, one of my favorites on, on the Atari back in the day. Yet, uh, we are not going to fashion ourselves as sort of quantum, uh, quantum computing experts, to say the least. My primary memory of quantum computing was I was at some sort of Microsoft press day sort of thing. And at the end, we went to their sort of quantum computing lab and I had just arrived from Taiwan and was pretty jet lagged and I think I fell asleep, um, in the lab, uh, which was, which was unfortunate. But I mean, the, the way I think about quantum computing is, I mean, you have the, you have this crazy state where in classical computing, you're dealing with bits and the whole thing with transistors is they're either on or off.

• 3:41Ben Thompson?

  And the fact that can be on or off is how the whole thing is built. It's built on this entire, like, all of logic can be devolved down into ones and zeros and it, and, uh, the whole chain of like how that happens is, is really interesting. But the long and short of it is that the way we do computing is that computers break everything down basically into ones and zeros and run these very simple calculations that are, you know, there, there's, there's just stacks and stacks of logic on top of this to make this possible. And we can sort of solve stuff. And one of the big shifts over that we've talked about in the context of AI is the shift from- General purpose computing to this GPU accelerated computing.

• 4:25Ben Thompson?

  And what that does is instead of having these relatively deep pipeline, general purpose chips, we have simpler cores or so an Nvidia card has like 4,000 cores on it or something, or the actual ones used for AI have way more than that. And it does these simpler calculations and it does them in parallel. So it's doing like a bunch of similar calculations all at the same time. And it's, this is parallelization. Quantum computing is like parallelization, but it's like just a completely, it's like a completely orthogonal. It's like, it does all the calculations at once at the same time. So it's kind of insane because a qubit, unlike a regular bit, it's not one or zero. It can sort of be all of the above at the same time.

• 5:11Ben Thompson?

  And

• 5:11Andrew Sharp?

  Right. That's what I couldn't really understand is like how you could possibly build systems that are anywhere approaching reliability.

• 5:20Ben Thompson?

  No, you can't.

• 5:21Andrew Sharp?

  If you're relying on qubits.

• 5:22Ben Thompson?

  Well, I mean, that's, that's part of the breakthrough here. So you have, you have these qubits that can be sort of at all states between zero and one. The problem is like you go to measure it and then it flattens down into either a zero or one. And so

• 5:37Andrew Sharp?

  Right, it changes.

• 5:38Ben Thompson?

  Right. And there's all these crazy things like different qubits can be entangled. So when one moves, the other one moves sort of X, Y, Z. I think the big, the more, the bigger breakthrough here is you have like a physical qubit. And then you have what's called a logical qubit, which is the qubit you actually do computation with. And one of the challenges is you have physical qubits that are very hard to stay in state. And what they've done is basically is shown that you can scale up the number of physical qubits such that they correct each other and keep each other in place. So that the logical qubit, which sits on top of the physical qubits is sort of stays in state long enough for you to do calculations on it.

• 6:21Ben Thompson?

  And, and they've basically shown that we can add more physical qubits to make it more stable, which is a big sort of breakthrough because usually more This little cubic thing would get less stable, but it's basically you they've they've figured out this error correction mechanic. Where ones fall out of state, the other ones that are part of the logical qubit, correct the ones that fall out of state. And they're all correcting each other such that the logical qubit stays in its it's state. Long enough that you can use it for sort of a calculation. That right there, I think, is the main is sort of the main breakthrough here. Because that's sort of a prerequisite to doing anything is that you have something that you can sort of operate on consistently. And you have a path towards it being sort of more useful, more useful over time.

• 7:05Ben Thompson?

  So and it's a genuine breakthrough. It's also one that's like five years on from the last sort of breakthrough or whatever it is. This is a field that it has applications. I mean, the the the classic one everyone talks about is breaking certain kinds of encryption. One thing that like a hard problem in what you do with a lot of encryption is you multiply two numbers together and then you get an end number. But to devolve that back to the numbers that created it, you have to factor it, right? I always remember factoring from like a middle school math or whatever, where you're sort of breaking apart a number into its different component pieces. So you can figure out what the variables are. I hated factoring back in the day.

• 7:46Ben Thompson?

  But instead of calculating every single possibility, which you would do with classical computing. This idea that you can sort of do all the possibilities sort of simultaneously and figure out what it is. In theory means you could get to a state where certain sorts of encryption algorithms, you could crack them very quickly. Pretty quickly, yeah. And but this doesn't apply to all encryption algorithms, just some of them. Some of them are more easily broken. There are workarounds sort of against this. It's not like encryption is going to be dead. And also, we're years and years away from this being possible because we're talking like super small. So that's one. There's like certain search applications, particularly on unstructured data, where again, you're just like right now.

• 8:31Ben Thompson?

  There's lots of applications where we just sort of do it serially. We try every possible. Thing and then we've eventually find the right one. And that's where they come out with these predictions. Oh yeah, to do this with classical computing would take seven septillion years or whatever it is. Cause that's assuming you're like going through and trying every single one. And what if you could try a bunch of one sort of simultaneously all at the same time in the different metaverses? Or whatever it might be. So there's real applications here. This is real progress. It has basically no implication on the world today as it is, or in sort of the, you know, the immediate to medium future. I mean, I guess the long term goes to infinity, so it does its applications there.

• 9:11Andrew Sharp?

  But um. Long term goes to septillion, Ben.

• 9:14Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so, um, so yeah, no, it's a breakthrough. It's cool. It's not really pertinent, I think, to anyone and not really pertinent to the sort of stuff we talk about on Sharp Tech or on Stratechery. So, and I probably even in this very high level fuzzy overview, got details wrong. So, uh, don't kill me for it.

• 9:34Andrew Sharp?

  Well, I appreciate the effort and I appreciate the question from Chris because I've seen sporadic mentions of quantum computing over the past few years. My wife is actually working on a project related to post quantum cryptography for her consulting work. And on Sharp China, there's always stories about China pursuing quantum computing and the US trying to do quantum computing. And so I wasn't necessarily sure. I mean, I was coming in pretty green here, um, but it's good to know at a high level that a lot of it's related to cryptography. And in the near term, a lot of it is sort of irrelevant to the tech story.

• 10:13Ben Thompson?

  Right. It's not all cryptography. It's like certain ones, like there's, there's a very famous algorithm like called RSA that's used like for web browsing and stuff like that. That's like tremendously broken. Um, and so that would have to be like solutions done to that. There's other ones like hashing algorithms that aren't really impacted at all. It's not an insurmountable problem. Like if someone had had quantum computing or there was visibility to it being a thing in the next decade, like it would be a big lift to update everything to make it resistant, but it's not. It's sometime framed as all encryption is dead and that's not the case. And so like

• 10:49Andrew Sharp?

  That's what my wife is working on, updating systems to be quantum resistant.

• 10:53Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, like so like Bitcoin, like the mining algorithm could be solved faster, but it's like a speed up. It's not breaking. The actual like keys where you hold your wallet, that could be broken tomorrow. So like, but so that would have to be changed. Like, so but so there's, there's, there's different out, there's different encryption methods that are impacted in sort of different ways. But again, I don't think there's any sense or worry that, that China is going to figure out tomorrow. And we thought it was like decades away. I think everyone's pretty clear. It's a, it's a long ways away. There's something here. It's certainly very compelling. The entanglement aspect of qubits being connected like across, like even though it would be close to each other is insane.

• 11:35Ben Thompson?

  Like there's, there's quantum mechanics, like it breaks your brain to, to a certain extent. That's why you throw in this like multiverse sort of aspect. I mean, sure, um, you know, we're, we're recording this. It is nine 47 a.m. on a Monday morning. I'm probably not in the right mental state of mind to explore the

• 11:53Andrew Sharp?

  To explore those possibilities. Well, I appreciated Google for throwing that in there because it made the story buzzier and more viral. And it's why we got a number of questions about Google's quantum computing efforts.

• 12:07Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, this whole test is silly because it's like, it's like simulating quantum mechanics. It's like using quantum mechanics to simulate quantum mechanics. And like the comparison to like how classical computing, it's not actually verifiable because number one, no one has tried to do it for obvious reasons. It would probably take forever. So they're comparing it to like a theoretical output. And there's actually been in the past, I don't have it offhand, but I know there's been tests they've done. And then someone's like, oh, actually we could do it in classical computing. They figure out some new algorithm that does, does it just as fast. So, um, I don't think that's, that's probably not the case here, but the actual test has no bearing on like anything in real life or whatever.

• 12:42Andrew Sharp?

  Again, solving real challenges that we face today. Okay.

• 12:45Ben Thompson?

  I think there is a real breakthrough here and it's really cool. I also, my least view right now is this has no real impact. On on sort of day to day life. So it's a fun story, but nothing to get too worried about.

• 12:57Andrew Sharp?

  Okay, there was one other tweet that I wanted to read here before we move on. A listener named Sam sent us this note from Trung Phan, who tweeted this in response to the Willow freakout that everyone was having. He wrote, "Google is really the new Bell Labs, just using that monopoly search money printer to throw off new inventions. Waymo, AlphaFold, the transformer Gen AI paper, Willow quantum computing, chips, and triple unskippable back to back to back pre-roll YouTube ads. Ben, do you agree that if any company has a claim to the Bell Labs legacy, it's Google?

• 13:36Ben Thompson?

  Absolutely. I mean, I think we've talked about that on this podcast before, and this is, you know, I mean, I guess it says something about me and I'm the wrong person to ask about quantum computing, where this question gets me much more excited. And I'm like, oh, my, my, my, my sort of brain gears starting.

• 13:52Andrew Sharp?

  Let's roll up our sleeves and talk through it. Yeah.

• 13:54Ben Thompson?

  It's an interesting sort of governance and philosophical question, right? Should we worry, like, Google One Search, congratulations, is it actually a better net positive that instead of going after them and trying to push against a string, as I frequently talk about, and undo this search monopoly, we should say, hey, yeah, just keep shoveling your money sort of into these science projects? Should there be some sort of similar to the Bell Labs, like part of the settlements the government had with ATT over the years, is they couldn't sort of go into those industries, they could only use those inventions for their own, and it worked out because things like transistors and information, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? I'm like, all the stuff they were working on was relevant to phone service.

• 14:36Ben Thompson?

  And so they got a benefit, but obviously it basically birthed modern computing. And it's hard to argue that that wasn't a big sort of net win. Like Bell Labs was basically the R and D department of the US. This is a point that Bruno Hobart made in his book in our interview a couple of weeks ago. It was basically the R and D lab for the US government. The US government could basically not have to spend all the money to do like Public R and D, they could just tolerate the ATT monopoly and say, you do the, you do all the money for R and D. And again, US sort of technological power is predicated on a lot of inventions that came out of Bell Labs.

• 15:17Ben Thompson?

  Now, is there some sort of disconnect here where what Google does ought to be shared more broadly? Transformers is a good example of what we want. It was a public paper. Anyone could pick up on it and do it and, and they did. And the fact that it's not sort of patented is a real victory. Should there be something similar with, you know, with a Waymo or whatever it might be?

• 15:40Ben Thompson?

  May- maybe, I mean, and is it really a criticism that, oh, they're inventing stuff that's not being sort of monetized? Or, you know, that, you know, I, I think that there's this, I'm not completely sure how to structure this. Like, do you just sort of back into a Bell Lab situation? Can you actually do it with purpose? I certainly tend to agree that a lot of the modern anti-trust crusaders spend a lot of time on challenges that they're not going to solve and that unfortunately have the outcome of not really helping anyone, including potentially killing stuff like this. So I think that that's a fair critique. But hey, uh, that, that like, i- it is an interesting philosophical discussion. What do you think?

• 16:25Andrew Sharp?

  First of all, yes, I think that Google is the closest we have to a modern day Bell Labs. I mean, if we could get a look at the internal projects from every company in big tech. I think Apple would be the most entertaining to see, you know, the Apple car and various failed ideas over the last 15 or 20 years. But Google, if everything they were working on was just released to the public domain tomorrow. I would guess, based on what I've read over the last couple of years, that their tech would have the most benefits to society at large and technological progress. And it's almost more interesting to have a company like that existing today than it was during the Bell Labs era, because now it feels like the government, I, I don't know that the government

• 17:11Andrew Sharp?

  is capable of. Pushing forward on the technological front, whereas 50, 75 years ago, I would trust the government more in that area. And so it seems like we've sort of outsourced a lot of technological innovation and research and R and D just generally to the private sector. And there are real benefits to that. And I don't know if that went away. I'm not sure who would be pushing forward. If it's not a company like Google that's sitting on just a mountain of cash and can afford to take moon shots in a variety of areas. Like I do think that's a real benefit to consider in this conversation.

• 17:51Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, governments can still kill stuff, though. And I mean, you folks seem to be going after Google. Just leave for Google alone.

• 17:58Andrew Sharp?

  Well, that, look, the theme of the podcast, there are trade offs in every area. There's a real cost to competition and innovation with Google's success. But they also are funding crazy moon shots and empowering Hartmut Nevin to do his worst out there and push forward on quantum computing. So.

• 18:19Ben Thompson?

  I mean, the quantum.

• 18:19Andrew Sharp?

  We'll see where it all bets out.

• 18:21Ben Thompson?

  There are other like folks working on it. Like, oh, Microsoft's been working on it for a long time. The, you meant the Apple mention is interesting because Apple generally does not do this kind of things. This, and this was actually a comparison that I thought was interesting between Nvidia and Apple that stood out to me when I was reading Take Kim's book is. Apple's pretty relentlessly focused on inventing for products. Like, like if it's not obviously commercializable, again, in this, like an Apple car, it wasn't theoretical is could this be a product? And once it was determined it's not going to be a product, then we're not going to just keep doing sort of research.

• 18:59Andrew Sharp?

  And that's for the record is why Apple would be so entertaining because it's like, these are things that we might have used and that might have gone to market. Whereas Google, I feel like it's a little bit more abstract and you'd have to be like a real developer or engineer to appreciate the brilliance that exists there and could benefit the world.

• 19:19Ben Thompson?

  Right. And from a shareholder and sort of analyst perspective, it's like. What are you wasting money on? Like, what's the point here?

• 19:25Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, well, um, we'll see. Uh, in any event, to keep it moving, Stu says, "It seems like you're purposely avoiding talking about these drone sightings, probably because anything you say would be pure speculation." Stu, that is correct, uh, but it got me thinking-

• 19:45Ben Thompson?

  Also, no, no, I know, I'm gonna push back on Stu. I am not a fan of assertions of sins of omission. Like, uh, I have not considered talking about drones on Sharp Tech. I'm not purposely avoiding anything. It doesn't seem really relevant to my topics or what I do. So, no, no asserting motivations to something that was not done. Uh, that's, that's, that's my feedback to Stu.

• 20:09Andrew Sharp?

  Well, we recorded last Wednesday night in the United States, Thursday morning, your time, and this was a story that was still very much developing. So, anything we said back then, uh, would have been a complete speculation, but in any event-

• 20:26Ben Thompson?

  Well, the good news is today it's still complete speculation, so-

• 20:29Andrew Sharp?

  Still complete speculation. Um, that's why I didn't foreground it in any of our andoral discussion. Uh, but he says, "It got me thinking about the technology of drones, which is apparently pretty much commoditized, parentheses, to the point that you can't really tell from photos, who made a drone." And then he says, "It also occurred to me that the drone is kind of like the iPad. It seems like it should be a useful platform, but outside of military applications or real estate photography, it doesn't really have much practical use. What are your thoughts on drones more broadly? Also, feel free to speculate about these drone sightings because they are kind of weird." Ben, do you have any thoughts on that take?

• 21:13Andrew Sharp?

  Um, I, the, the main reason I included this is because I loved calling drones the iPads of the sky, at least as far as consumer tech is concerned, but do you have thoughts?

• 21:23Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I, I disagree. I think drones are, are very compelling. I mean, the, the military one, I think, can't be understated. Like, drones are pretty clearly the future of military. They're not the future, they're the present.

• 21:36Andrew Sharp?

  All right, and that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at [email protected].