>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the queue. It's virtual coverage of Avis reinvent 2020 I'm John furry, your host. Um, this is a cute virtual we're here. Not in, in remote. We're not in person this year, so we're doing the remote interviews. And then this segment is going to build on the quantum conversation we had last year, Richard moles, general manager of Amazon bracket and aid was quantum computing and Fernando Brandao head of quantum algorithms at AWS and Brent professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. Fernando, thanks for coming on, Richard. Thanks for joining us. >>You're welcome to be here. >>So, Fernando, first of all, love your title, quantum algorithms. That's the coolest title I've heard so far and you're pretty smart because you're a theoretical professor of physics at Caltech. So, um, which I'd never be able to get into, but I wish I could get into there someday, but, uh, thanks for coming on. Um, quantum has been quite the rage and you know, there's a lot of people talking about it. Um, it's not ready for prime time. Some say it's moving faster than others, but where are we on quantum right now? What are, what are you, what are you seeing Fernanda where the quantum, where are peg us in the evolution of, of, uh, where we are? >>Um, yeah, what quantum, uh, it's an emerging and rapidly developing fields. Uh, but we are see where are you on, uh, both in terms of, uh, hardware development and in terms of identifying the most impactful use cases of one company. Uh, so, so it's, it's, it's early days for everyone and, and we have like, uh, different players and different technologies that are being sport. And I think it's, it's, it's early, but it's exciting time to be doing quantum computing. And, uh, and it's very interesting to see the interest in industry growing and, and customers. Uh, for example, Casa from AWS, uh, being, uh, being willing to take part in this journey with us in developmental technology. >>Awesome. Richard, last year we talked to bill Vass about this and he was, you know, he set expectations really well, I thought, but it was pretty much in classic Amazonian way. You know, it makes the announcement a lot of progress then makes me give us the update on your end. You guys now are shipping brackets available. What's the update on your end and Verner mentioned in his keynote this week >> as well. Yeah, it was a, it was great until I was really looking at your interview with bill. It was, uh, that was when we launched the launch the service a year ago, almost exactly a year ago this week. And we've come a long way. So as you mentioned, we've, uh, we've, uh, we've gone to general availability with the service now that that happened in August. So now a customer can kind of look into the, uh, to the bracket console and, uh, installed programming concept computers. You know, there's, uh, there's tremendous excitement obviously, as, as you mentioned, and Fernando mentioned, you know, quantum computers, uh, we think >>Have the potential to solve problems that are currently, uh, uh, unsolvable. Um, the goal of bracket is to fundamentally give customers the ability to, uh, to go test, uh, some of those notions to explore the technology and to just start planning for the future. You know, our goal was always to try and solve some of the problems that customers have had for, you know, gee, a decade or so now, you know, they tell us from a variety of different industries, whether it's drug discovery or financial services, whether it's energy or there's chemical engineering, machine learning, you know, th the potential for quantum computer impacts may industries could potentially be disruptive to those industries. And, uh, it's, it's essential that customers can can plan for the future, you know, build their own internal resources, become experts, hire the right staff, figure out where it might impact their business and, uh, and potentially disrupt. >>So, uh, you know, in the past they're finding it hard to, to get involved. You know, these machines are very different, different technologies building in different ways of different characteristics. Uh, the tooling is very disparate, very fragmented. Historically, it's hard for companies to get access to the machines. These tend to be, you know, owned by startups or in, you know, physics labs or universities, very difficult to get access to these things, very different commercial models. Um, and, uh, as you, as you suggested, a lot of interests, a lot of hype, a lot of claims in the industry, customers want to cut through all that. They want to understand what's real, uh, what they can do today, uh, how they can experiment and, uh, and get started. So, you know, we see bracket as a catalyst for innovation. We want to bring together end-users, um, consultants, uh, software developers, um, providers that want to host services on top of bracket, try and get the industry, you know, rubbing along them. You spoke to lots of Amazonians. I'm sure you've heard the phrase innovation flywheel, plenty of times. Um, we see the same approach that we've used successfully in IOT and robotics and machine learning and apply that same approach to content, machine learning software, to quantum computing, and to learn, to bring it together. And, uh, if we get the tooling right, and we make it easy, um, then we don't see any reason why we can't, uh, you know, rapidly try and move this industry forward. And >>It was fun areas where there's a lot of, you know, intellectual computer science, um, technology science involved in super exciting. And Amazon's supposed to some of that undifferentiated heavy. >>That's what I am, you know, it's like, >>There's a Maslow hierarchy of needs in the tech industry. You know, people say, Oh, why five people freak out when there's no wifi? You know, you can't get enough compute. Right. So, you know, um, compute is one of those things with machine learning is seeing the benefits and quantum there's so much benefits there. Um, and you guys made some announcements at, at re-invent, uh, around BRACA. Can you share just quickly share some of those updates, Richard? >>Sure. I mean, it's the way we innovate at AWS. You know, we, we start simple and we, and we build up features. We listen to customers and we learn as we go along, we try and move as quickly as possible. So since going public in, uh, in, in August, we've actually had a string of releases, uh, pretty consistent, um, delivering new features. So we try to tie not the integration with the platform. Customers have told us really very early on that they, they don't just want to play with the technology. They want to figure out how to, how to envisage a production quantum computing service, how it might look, you know, in the context of a broad cloud platform with AWS. So we've, uh, we launched some integration with, uh, other AWS capabilities around security, managing limits, quotas, tagging resources, that type of thing, things that are familiar to, uh, to, to, to current AWS users. >>Uh, we launched some new hardware. Uh, all of our partners D-Wave launched some, uh, uh, you know, a 5,000 cubit machine, uh, just in September. Uh, so we made that available on bracket the same day that they launched that hardware, which was very cool. Um, you know, we've made it, uh, we've, we've made it easier for researchers. We've been, you know, impressed how many academics and researchers have used the service, not just large corporations. Um, they want to have really deep access to these machines. They want to program these things at a low level. So we launched some features, uh, to enable them to do their research, but reinvent, we were really focused on two things, um, simulators and making it much easier to use, uh, hybrid systems systems that, uh, incorporate classical compute, traditional digital computing with quantum machinery, um, in the vein that follow some of the liens that we've seen, uh, in machine learning. >>So, uh, simulators are important. They're a very important part of, uh, learning how to use concepts, computers. They're always available 24, seven they're super convenient to use. And of course they're critical in verifying the accuracy of the results that we get from quantum hardware. When we launched the service behind free simulator for customers to help debug their circuits and experiments quickly, um, but simulating large experiments and large systems is a real challenge on classical computers. You know, it, wasn't hard on classical. Uh, then you wouldn't need a quantum computer. That's the whole point. So running large simulations, you know, is expensive in terms of resources. It's complicated. Uh, we launched a pretty powerful simulator, uh, back in August, which we thought at the time was always powerful managed. Quantum stimulates circuit handled 34 cubits, and it reinvented last week, we launched a new simulator, which actually the first managed simulator to use tensor network technology. >>And it can run up to 50 cubits. So we think is, we think is probably the most powerful, uh, managed quantum simulator on the market today. And customers can flip easily between either using real quantum hardware or either of our, uh, stimulators just by changing a line of code. Um, the other thing we launched was the ability to run these hybrid systems. You know, quantum computers will get more, no don't get onto in a moment is, uh, today's computers are very imperfect, you know, lots of errors. Um, we working, obviously the industry towards fault-tolerant machines and Fernando can talk about some research papers that were published in that area, but right now the machines are far from perfect. And, uh, and the way that we can try to squeeze as much value out of these devices today is to run them in tandem with classical systems. >>We think of the notion of a self-learning quantum algorithm, where you use a classical optimization techniques, such as we see machine learning to tweak and tune the parameters of a quantum algorithm to try and iterate and converge on the best answer and try and overcome some of these issues surrounding errors. That's a lot of moving parts to orchestrate for customers, a lot of different systems, a lot of different programming techniques. And we wanted to make that much easier. We've been impressed with a, a, an open projects, been around for a couple of years, uh, called penny lane after the Beatles song. And, um, so we wanted to double down on that. We were getting a lot of positive feedback from customers about the penny lane talk it, so we decided to, uh, uh, make it a first class citizen on bracket, make it available as a native feature, uh, in our, uh, in our Jupiter notebooks and our tutorials learning examples, um, that open source project has very similar, um, guiding principles that we do, you know, it's open, it's cross platform, it's technology agnostic, and we thought he was a great fit to the service. >>So we, uh, we announced that and made it available to customers and, uh, and, and, uh, already getting great feedback. So, uh, you know, finishing the finishing the year strongly, I think, um, looking forward to 2021, you know, looking forward to some really cool technology it's on the horizon, uh, from a hardware point of view, making it easy to use, um, you know, and always, obviously trying to work back from customer problems. And so congratulations on the success. I'm sure it's not hard to hire people interested, at least finding qualified people it'd be different, but, you know, sign me up. I love quantum great people, Fernando real quick, understanding the relationship with Caltech unique to Amazon. Um, tell us how that fits into the, into this, >>Uh, right. John S no, as I was saying, it's it's early days, uh, for, for quantum computing, uh, and to make progress, uh, in abreast, uh, put together a team of experts, right. To work both on, on find new use cases of quantum computing and also, uh, building more powerful, uh, quantum hardware. Uh, so the AWS center for quantum computing is based at Caltech. Uh, and, and this comes from the belief of AWS that, uh, in quantum computing is key to, uh, to keep close, to stay close of like fresh ideas and to the latest scientific developments. Right. And Caltech is if you're near one computing. So what's the ideal place for doing that? Uh, so in the center, we, we put together researchers and engineers, uh, from computer science, physics, and other subjects, uh, from Amazon, but also from all the academic institutions, uh, of course some context, but we also have Stanford and university of Chicago, uh, among others. So we broke wrongs, uh, in the beauty for AWS and for quantum computer in the summer, uh, and under construction right now. Uh, but, uh, as we speak, John, the team is busy, uh, uh, you know, getting stuff in, in temporary lab space that we have at cottage. >>Awesome. Great. And real quick, I know we've got some time pressure here, but you published some new research, give a quick a plug for the new research. Tell us about that. >>Um, right. So, so, you know, as part of the effort or the integration for one company, uh, we are developing a new cubix, uh, which we choose a combination of acoustic and electric components. So this kind of hybrid Aquacel execute, it has the promise for a much smaller footprint, think about like a few microliters and much longer storage times, like up to settlements, uh, which, which is a big improvement over the scale of the arts sort of writing all export based cubits, but that's not the whole story, right? On six, if you have a good security should make good use of it. Uh, so what we did in this paper, they were just put out, uh, is, is a proposal for an architecture of how to build a scalable quantum computer using these cubits. So we found from our analysis that we can get more than a 10 X overheads in the resources required from URI, a universal thought around quantum computer. >>Uh, so what are these resources? This is like a smaller number of physical cubits. Uh, this is a smaller footprint is, uh, fewer control lines in like a smaller approach and a consistent, right. And, and these are all like, uh, I think this is a solid contribution. Uh, no, it's a theoretical analysis, right? So, so the, uh, the experimental development has to come, but I think this is a solid contribution in the big challenge of scaling up this quantum systems. Uh, so, so, so John, as we speak like, uh, data blessed in the, for quantum computing is, uh, working on the experimental development of this, uh, a highly adequacy architecture, but we also keep exploring other promising ways of doing scalable quantum computers and eventually, uh, to bring a more powerful computer resources to AWS customers. >>It's kind of like machine learning and data science, the smartest people work on it. Then you democratize that. I can see where this is going. Um, Richard real quick, um, for people who want to get involved and participate or consume, what do they do? Give us the playbook real quick. Uh, so simple, just go to the AWS console and kind of log onto the, to the bracket, uh, bracket console, jump in, you know, uh, create, um, create a Jupiter notebook, pull down some of our sample, uh, applications run through the notebook and program a quantum computer. It's literally that simple. There's plenty of tutorials. It's easy to get started, you know, classic cloud style right now from commitment. Jump in, start simple, get going. We want you to go quantum. You can't go back, go quantum. You can't go back to regular computing. I think people will be running concert classical systems in parallel for quite some time. So yeah, this is the, this is definitely not a one way door. You know, you go explore quantum computing and see how it fits into, uh, >>You know, into the, into solving some of the problems that you wanted to solve in the future. But definitely this is not a replacement technology. This is a complimentary technology. >>It's great. It's a great innovation. It's kind of intoxicating technically to get, think about the benefits Fernando, Richard, thanks for coming on. It's really exciting. I'm looking forward to keeping up keeping track of the progress. Thanks for coming on the cube coverage of reinvent, quantum computing going the next level coexisting building on top of the shoulders of other giant technologies. This is where the computing wave is going. It's different. It's impacting people's lives. This is the cube coverage of re-invent. Thanks for watching.

[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM welcome back everybody you're watching the cube and our continuous coverage of IBM think Digital 20/20 events it's we've been wall-to-wall for a couple days now and and we bring in you all the action a bass fall is here here he is the global league for quantum education and open science at IBM quantum gave great to see you thanks for coming on yeah thanks for having me here Dave you're very welcome love the discussion on quantum but I gotta say so I'm reading your bio in your bio I see quantum algorithms experimental quantum computation nanoscale device fabrication cryogenic measurements and quantum software development hardware programming etc so you're obviously qualified to talk about quantum but but how how can somebody learn about quantum do I have to be like a rocket scientist then understand this stuff so Dave this is one of the things that I'm very passionate about it's also my job to make sure that anyone can learn about quantum computing today so primarily what I'm focused on is making sure that you don't need a PhD to program a quantum computer when I was going through my graduate studies trying to learn quantum computing I needed access to a lab so I have to go to graduate school to do this but in 2016 IBM put a quantum computer on the cloud in that dramatically changes the field it allows access to anyone from the world with just an internet connection to program a quantum computer so the question I'm trying to answer on a daily basis now is the question that you asked how do I learn to program a quantum computer well I'm trying to make several resources available for you to do that okay well let's talk about those resources I mean you have quantum you have access to quantum computers I talked to Jamie Thomas the other day she said that you guys it's all available in the IBM cloud I can't even I can't even imagine what the infrastructure behind that looks like but as a user I don't have to see that so how do I get access to this stuff so there are several quantum computers available on the cloud now and every time I think about this it's fascinating to me because I needed access to a lab to access these things but now you don't you can go to quantum computing dot ibm.com and get free access to several quantum computers now the question becomes if I give you this access to the quantum computers how do you learn to program them the software that you use to program them is called kiss kit just like we've made access to the quantum computers open for everyone our software is also open source you can access it by going to Kiska torgue that's QIS ki t org and if you go in particular to Kiska org slash education we've put together a textbook to help you go through everything that you'd learn in a classroom about quantum algorithms and to start programming the real quantum systems yourself so everything's ready for you to program immediately what was the it can you give me the quantity IBM want them - computing URL again yeah that's quantum - computing IBM com once you create an account there you immediately get access to several quantum computers which is an impressive thing to think about the cryogenics that you mentioned earlier the hardware the software all of it is ready for you to take advantage of but I gotta ask you I know it's sort of off topic here but but if I had to look under the covers I'm gonna see some big cryogenic unit with a bunch of cables coming in is that right that's exactly it very cold inside that's right so the way to here's the way to think about it outer space is about 200 times colder than room temperature and the temperature where the chip the quantum chips it's is another 200 times lower than that so we're talking very cold here we're talking only 15 Mille kelvins above absolute zero that's zero point zero one five degrees above absolute zero so it's a very cold system and you'd have several wires that are going down into this coil system to try to communicate with the quantum ship well and what's exciting to me about this whole thing Abe is it is it brings me back to the sort of the early days of computing and the you know huge rooms and now look where we are today and so I would expect that over the next many decades you're going to see sort of similar advanced advances in quantum and being able to actually execute at somewhat higher temperatures and in miniaturization it's very exciting time and we're really obviously at the very very early innings but I want to ask you just in terms of if if I'm a programmer and I'm a Java programmer can I actually come in and start using quantum if you what do I need to know to get started so you need to know two things the first thing is you need to be familiar with any programming language the easiest programming language to pick up today by far is Python so kiss kit is built based on Python so if you're able to quickly catch up with a few things in Python and we have a chapter dedicated to this topic in our textbook that's the first thing the second thing is simply having the ability to learn something new simply being excited about this field once you have those two together you can learn quantum computing very quickly within a few months the question then becomes catching up with the research and reading research papers that can take some time but for us to be able to talk through a quantum program takes only a few a few days of reading let's talk about what some of the folks are doing with quantum we talked again to Jamie Thomas and she gave me some examples not surprisingly you know you saw for instance some some examples in pharmaceutical and to the other obvious industries but then banking came in it's a but what what is it what are people doing with quantum today maybe you could add some color to that primarily most of the working quantum today is focused on understanding how to take problems in industry whether it is to understand how to simulate molecules whether it is to understand how to optimize a financial portfolio taking those problems and mapping them onto a quantum computer so that they can get solved so you'll see various various industries exploring how to take their problems and map onto a quantum computer so one one exciting one that I'm seeing a lot of progress in is chemistry learning how to simulate molecules using these quantum computers as someone with a physics background for me the exciting thing to see here is also how people are using these quantum computers which fundamentally are taking advantage of quantum mechanics to simulate other quantum systems so to understand nature better by using nature itself so this is another exciting progress that we're seeing in the field so exciting both from industry and from educational and science purpose so obviously it's a fascinating field and people would you say with curiosity it can get excited about it but but let's say I actually want you know some some kind of career in part of I mean what well how would people sort of get involved do you see you know on the horizon that this is gonna be something that is actually gonna be a vocation for you know young folks that want to get involved I could not tell you how challenging it is to find people who have the right combination of quantum computing knowledge and classical programming knowledge so in order to be able to take full advantage of the quantum systems today we need people who understand both the hardware and the software to some level and there is an extreme shortage of that kind of talent so the work that I'm focused on is exactly this problem of solving the workforce development problem so we're trying to make sure that people have access to anything that they need in order to be able to program a quantum computer and to learn how to then map their own problems into these quantum computers in the future the question becomes let's say we now understand how to use quantum computers to make financial portfolio optimization every bank in the world is going to want someone to implement this in their systems which immediately creates lots of jobs so this is going to become something that's in demand once it becomes possible on a on a large quantum computer so today is the right time to learn how to work with these quantum systems so that when the time comes that there are industries that are needing quantum skills you're ready to be hired for those positions okay so big skills gap you kind of gave an example in financial services where maybe some of the other things that you hope that that people are going to be able to do over time with these skills I cannot under I cannot over us overstate how important it is to learn how to simulate chemistry problems on these quantum computers that will have impacts anywhere ranging from whether it's drug design whether it's making better efficient solar panels more efficient batteries there are many applications where you'll see impact from these so the there are many industries that can benefit from understanding how to work with quantum computers that's something exciting I'm looking forward to see you know you read in the press that you know we're at least a decade away you know from from quantum being a reality but you're giving some examples where it's sort of here today I feel like it's going to come in layers you know not gonna be one big bang it's gonna come over time but but maybe you could you know frame that for us in terms of how you see this market developing I don't even want to call it a market but just this technology developing into a market what what has to take place and what kind of things can we expect along that journey sure so I think it's very important to keep in mind that quantum computers are fairly young technology so we're improving the technology as we go and there has been dramatic improvement in the technology itself but we're still learning as we go so one of the things that you'll find is that all of the applications work that's being done today is exploring how to take advantage of the quantum computer in some way if I immediately gave you a fully functional perfect quantum computer today you wouldn't even know what to do with it right you need to understand how to map problems on to that quantum computer so in preparation for that time several years away you'll see a lot of people trying to learn how to take advantage of quantum computers today and as they get better and better learning how to take advantage of whatever incremental progress is being made so as much as it seems like quantum computers are several years away many people are learning how to program them today just in preparation for that time when they're ready for use and my understanding is we're gonna get there with you know hybrid models today you're using you know traditional microprocessor technology to sort of read and write data from quantum that's likely going to continue for quite some time maybe maybe indefinitely but but but perhaps not right so Dave the important thing to remember is that a quantum computer works jointly with a classical computer if you ask me the question of how do i optimize my portfolio the numbers that I would need to compute with our classical there's nothing quantum about them these are numbers so there's classical information that you then have to take and map on to the quantum computer and then once the quantum computer is done you have to take the data out of that computer and then turn it back into classical information so you'll always have a quantum computer working jointly with a classical computer the question now is how do you make those two work together so that you can extract some benefit that you couldn't have attained with just the classic what do you see is the big sort of technical challenges that you're paying attention to you paying attention to I mean is it getting more you know qubits is a coherence working at higher temperatures what are the things that you see is as the the scientists are working on to move things forward so one of the things that I can do immediately Dave if you and I agreed right now is we can go to the lab and take a quantum chip and put a thousand cubits on that quantum chip that's fine we can do that immediately the problem that you'll find is that it doesn't matter that you have a thousand cubits if the qubits are not good quality cuteness so the technology should focus on improving the fundamental qualities of the qubits themselves before scaling them up to larger numbers in addition to that as you're scaling to larger and larger numbers new problems come into the picture so making better qubits scaling up seeing how the technology is doing learning new things and then scaling farther up that seems to be the model that's working today so in addition to monitoring the quality of the qubits themselves I'm monitoring within the technology how people are implementing solutions to scaling problems in addition to that another important problem that deserves a lot of attention is the question of how do you make good software that can take problems and map them onto quantum computers in in quantum computing when I say I'm running upon a program really what I'm doing is building a quantum circuit and then running that quantum circuit on the real device well if that circuit has certain operations in it maybe you want to tailor the way you transfer that circuit onto the device in a way that takes full advantage of the device itself but then in order to do that you need to write good software so improvements in the software along with improvements in the quantum technology itself will be how we get to success and at IBM we're focused on finding a metric that wraps all of these things together and it's called quantum volume and we're seeing improvements in the quantum volume of our systems as we go yeah Jamie talked about that you're essentially taking the key metrics and putting them into a you know a single observable metric that obviously you can track over time so I want to ask you about security a lot of people are concerned that the quantum is just going to blow away everything that we know cryptography and all the you know the the passwords and security systems that we we've put in place is that a legitimate concern will quantum you both get us into that problem and take us out of that that problem I wonder if you could talk about that so there are two ways to think about this problem one is just fundamentally if you ask me what does it take to put the the cryptography that has our bank accounts safe over the internet connections that we use it takes roughly about a thousand good cubits okay if I tell you a thousand good cubits that doesn't seem like a lot of work but when you think about it what it really requires is an overhead of about a thousand cubits for each qubit that we have today so the numbers of qubits that you need are in the millions in order to put the the kind of cryptography that we're using today at stake so certainly there's a long way to go that's one aspect of the story the other aspect of the story is that we should never underestimate the progress of technology so even though the time when we can use Shor's algorithm which is the algorithm that can be used to break the cryptographic algorithms like RSA even though that's several years away you still want to be ready for that time and what that means is if you have sensitive information today you need to be making sure that that information itself is protected with quantum resistant cryptographic techniques so that when the time comes you can't use a quantum computer to get back the data from today and break so two perspectives one is we're quite a while away from this kind of danger but at the same time it doesn't mean we should be complacent today we should be taking preparations make sure that our critical information is protected yeah that's so that that makes a lot of sense but when you say we're a ways away or we are we decades away we years away we can you and you quantify that in any reasonable way it's hard to speculate on that number so I'll refrain from giving you a specific timeline just to give you an idea the quantum bits that were in development ten years ago had a coherence time so the amount of time that they can store the quantum information of roughly a hundred times smaller than they are today and ten years ago if you asked people how do we get to a hundred times better qubits nobody would have been able to give you a clear answer you could have guessed some ways but nobody would have been able to tell you we'll get there in ten years but we did so instead of coming up with estimates of timelines that depend on what we know today it's probably a better idea to monitor the technology as it goes and keep adapting we're probably talking this century where we're talking to the century hopefully it is my last mission to enable enough people to learn quantum such that it happens within my life very exciting field a I can't thank you enough for helping us educate the audience and and my and myself personally really I'm I'm so fascinated by this it's something that you know jumper and I and the team have been really focused on and I think it's really time to your point the start digging and start learning you've given us some resources there give us give them give us those two reasons one more time there's there's the IBM site and the the the the the queue kit site use that site what are those again just those to wrap so you can access the quantum computers at quantum - computing ibm.com and once you're there the way to learn how to program these quantum computers is by using kiss kit which you can learn about by going to kiss kit org slash education once here at that education page you can access our textbook which we make open-source it's a textbook that's co-written with professors in the field and is open source so it's continually getting updated you can access that textbook at tisket org slash textbook if you go to our youtube channel you'll find several videos that allow you to also learn very quickly so kiss gets YouTube channel is another great place to look so lots of resources and that's kiss kit with a Q which is why I wrote it that way so alright exact thanks so much it was great to see you stay safe and next time hopefully we'll see you face-to-face and you can draw some some cool pictures to help me understand this even better Dave it was nice talking with you I look forward to learning quantum programming with you yeah Cheers and thank you for watching everybody this is the cubes coverage of the IBM think 2020 digital event experience we'll be right back Brennan for this short break [Music] you

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're in downtown San Francisco with the Salesforce Tower. We're in the 33rd floor with the grand opening of the Accenture Innovation hub. It's five stories inside of the Salesforce Tower. It's pretty amazing, couple of work floors and then all kinds of labs and cool things. Tonight they introduce the technology vision. We've been coming for a couple of years. Paul Daugherty and team. Introduce that later, but we're excited to have a couple of the core team from the innovation hub. And we're joined by Mary Hamilton She's a managing director of Accenture Labs. Great to see you Mary. >> Nice to see you too. >> And Teresa Tung also managing director of Accenture Labs. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So it's been quite a day. Starting with the ribbon cutting and the tours. This is quite a facility. So, what does it mean having this type of an asset at your disposal in your client engagements, training your own people, it's a pretty cool spot. >> Yeah, I think it's actually something that's, these innovation hubs are something that we're growing in the U.S. and around the world, but I think here in San Francisco, we have a really unique space and really unique team and opportunity where we're actually bringing together all of our innovation capabilities. We have all of them centered here and with the staircase that connects everyone, we can now serve clients by bringing the best of the best to put together the best solutions that have open innovation and research and co-creation and innovation all in one. >> Right and you had a soft opening how many months ago? So you've actually been running clients through here for a number of months, right? >> We have. So, we've been working here probably about six months in the workspaces. We've been bringing clients through, kind of breaking in the space, but just over the holidays we opened sort of all of the specialty spaces. So, the Igloo, the Immersive Experience, we've got a Makeshop, and those all started to open up so our employees can take advantage and our clients can come in. >> Right, right. >> Yeah. >> So one of the things that comes up over and over I think in every other interview that we've had today is the rock stars that are available here to help your clients. And Teresa I got to brag on you. >> Got one here. >> You're one of the rock stars, all you hear about is most patents of any services for most patents from this office of all the other offices in Accenture. >> All of Accenture >> You're probably the person. (laughs) So congratulations. Talk about your work. It's funny, doing some research, you have an interview from a long time ago, you didn't even think you wanted to get in tech. >> Yeah. >> Now you're kicking out more patents than anybody in Accenture which has like 600,000 people. Pretty great accomplishment. >> I think it's a great story how a lot about people think about technology as a geek sort of thing and they don't actually picture themselves in that role but really, technology is about imagining the future and then being able to make it happen. You can imagine an idea, and you think Cloud, and AI, VR, it's all so accessible today. You could buy a 3D printer and just print your own idea. >> Right. >> And that's so much different than I think it was even ten, twenty years ago. And so when you think about tech, it's much more about making something happen instead of, just again, coding and math. Those are enablers but that's not the outcome. >> Right, right. So what type is your specialty in terms of the type of patent work that you've done? >> I've done them all. So I start with cloud computing, doing a lot of APIs and AI. Most recently doing a lot of work on robotics and that's the next generation. >> Right. so one of the cool things here is, software is obvious, right? You get to do software development, but there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of tangible stuff. You talked about robotics, there's a robotics lab. Fancy 3D printing lab. >> There's like this, >> Yep. >> I don't know, the maker lab, I guess you call it? >> That's right. >> So, I don't know that most people would think of Accenture maybe as being so engaged in co-creation of physical things beyond software innovation. So, has that been going on for a long time? Is that relatively new? And how is it playing in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so, there's a few things we've been doing. Some of it is the acquisitions we've made, so Mindtribe, Pillar, Matter, that really have that expertise in industrial design and physical products. So we're getting to that space. And then, I'm also, as a researcher's standpoint, I'm really excited about some of the area that you'd never think Accenture would play in around material science. So if you start to combine material science plus artificial intelligence, you start to have smart materials for smart products and that's where we see the future going is what are all the kinds of products and services that we might provide with new material? And new ways to use those materials And, >> Right. >> My original background, my degree is in material science so I feel like I've kind of come full circle and exactly what Teresa was saying is how can you design things and come up with new things? But now we're bringing it from a technology perspective. >> Right, got to get that graphene water filtration system so we can solve the water problem in California. That's another topic for another day. But I think one of the cool things is really the integration of the physical and the software. I think a really kind of underreported impact of what we're seeing today are connected devices. Not that they're just connected to do things, but they phone home at the end of the day and really enable the people that developed the products, to actually know how they're being used. And then the other thing I think is so powerful is you can get shared learning. I think that's one of the cool thing about autonomous cars and Waymo, right? If there's an accident, it's not just the people involved in the accident and the insurance adjuster that learn what not to do but you can actually integrate that learning now into the broader system. Everyone learns from one incident and that is so, so-- >> Right. >> different than what it was before. >> Yeah I mean, it really points to type of shared pursuits of larger business outcomes. By yourself, a company might see their customer and impact their business and their product, but if you think about the outcome for the customer, it's around taking an ecosystem approach. It might be your car, your insurance company, you as an individual, and maybe you might be a hobbyist with the car, you're mechanic. Like this ecosystem that I just described here. It's the same across all of the different types of verticals. People need to come together to share data to pursue these bigger outcomes. >> Right, you need to say? >> I was just going to say, and along those lines, if you're sharing data, those insights go across the legal system. But then they can get plugged back in to thinking about the design, and we're looking at something called generative design where if you have that data, you can start to actually give the designer new creative solutions that they may not have thought about. >> Right. >> So you can kind of say, hey based on these parameters of the data we've received back about this product, here are all the permutations of design that you might want to consider, and here's all the levers you can pull and then the designer can go in and then say, okay, this makes sense, this doesn't. But it gives them the set of here are all of the options based on the data. >> Right. >> And I think that's incredibly brilliant. It's kind of the human plus machine coming together to be more intelligent. >> So, human plus machine, great Segway, right? What we just got out of the presentation and one of the guys said there's three shortages coming up. There's food, water and people. And that the whole kind of automation and machines taking jobs is not the right conversation at all, that we desperately need machines and technology to take many of the tasks away because there aren't enough people to do all the tasks that are required. >> I mean think about it as a good thing. As a human, the human plus workers really enabling your job to be easier, more efficient, more effective, safer. So any task that's dull dirty, dangerous, those are things that we don't want to do as humans. We shouldn't be doing those as humans. That's a great place for the robotics and the machines to really pair with us. Or AI, AI can do a lot of those jobs at scale that again, as a human we shouldn't be doing. It's boring. Now you could have human plus machine whether it's robotics or AI to actually make the human a higher level worker. >> Right, I love the three Ds there. You got to add the fourth D, drudgery. Talking about automation, right, it's like drudgery. Nobody wants to do drudgery work. But unfortunately we still do. I mean, I'm ready for some more automation in my daily tasks for sure. Okay, so before we wrap up. What are you looking forward to? We got through the ribbon cutting. Are there some things coming in the short term that people should know about, that you're excited that you're either doing here, or some of your, kind of research directives now that we got the big five from Paul and team. What are you doing in the next little while that you can share? >> Well, I'm excited to have clients coming in, so >> Yeah. >> Al lot of the innovations that we have like Quantum Computing. This is a big bet for Accenture. At the moment, at the time we started Quantum Computing, our clients weren't begging for it yet. We made that market. We went out and took a bet. We saw how the technology was changing. We saw the investments in Quantum. We made the relationships with 1QBit, with IBM and through that, now we're able to find this client opportunity with Biogen and that's the story that we published a drug discovery method that is actually much better than what would happen before. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Mary? >> For me it's about, it's also the clients and it's thinking about it from a co-research and co-innovation standpoint. So, how do we establish strategic, multiyear, long-term relationships with our clients where we're doing joint research together and we're leveraging everything that's in this amazing center, to bring the best and to kind of have this ongoing cycle of what's the next thing. How are we going to innovate together, and how are we going to transform them, talk about approximately from building physical products to building a set of services. >> Right, right. >> And I think that's just taking advantage of this to make that transformation with our clients is so exciting to me. >> Well, what a great space with great energy and clearly you guys look like you're ready to go. >> Hey, we are. >> So congrats again on the event, and thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing this terrific space with us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right. She's Teresa, she's Mary, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube, from San Francisco the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Toronto Canada, it's The Cube, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello, everyone welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in conjunction with the Blockchain futurist happening this week it's run. I'm John Fourier, my cohost Dave Vellante, we're here with Cube alumni, Bradley Rotter, pioneer Blockchain investor, seasoned pro was there in the early days as an investor in hedge funds, continuing to understand the impacts of cryptocurrency, and its impact for investors, and long on many of the crypto. Made some great predictions on The Cube last time at Polycon in the Bahamas. Bradley, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thank you, good to see both of you. >> Good to have you back. >> So I want to just get this out there because you have an interesting background, you're in the cutting edge, on the front lines, but you also have a history. You were early before the hedge fund craze, as a pioneer than. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that and than how it connects to today, and see if you see some similarities, talk about that. >> I actually had begun trading commodity futures contracts when I was 15. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is a small state in the Midwest. >> I've heard of it. >> And I was in charge of >> Was it a test market? (laughing) >> I was in charge of hedging our one corn contract so I learned learned the mechanisms of the market. It was great experience. I traded commodities all the way through college. I got to go to West Point as undergrad. And I raced back to Chicago as soon as I could to go to the University of Chicago because that's where commodities were trading. So I'd go to night school at night at the University of Chicago and listen to Nobel laureates talk about the official market theory and during the day I was trading on the floor of the the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Grown men yelling, kicking, screaming, shoving and spitting, it was fabulous. (laughing) >> Sounds like Blockchain today. (laughing) >> So is that what the dynamic is, obviously we've seen the revolution, certainly of capital formation, capital deployment, efficiency, liquidity all those things are happening, how does that connect today? What's your vision of today's market? Obviously lost thirty billion dollars in value over the past 24 hours as of today and we've taken a little bit of a haircut, significant haircut, since you came on The Cube, and you actually were first to predict around February, was a February? >> February, yeah. >> You kind of called the market at that time, so props to that, >> Yup. >> Hope you're on the right >> Thank you. >> side of those shorts >> Thank you. >> But what's going on? What is happening in the capital markets, liquidity, why are the prices dropping? What's the shift? So just a recap, at the time in February, you said look I'm on short term bear, on Bitcoin, and may be other crypto because all the money that's been made. the people who made it didn't think they had to pay taxes. And now they're realizing, and you were right on. You said up and up through sort of tax season it's going to be soft and then it's going to come back and it's exactly what happened. Now it's flipped again, so your thoughts? >> So my epiphany was I woke up in the middle of the night and said oh my God, I've been to this rodeo before. I was trading utility tokens twenty years ago when they were called something else, IRUs, do you remember that term? IRU was the indefeasible right to use a strand of fiber, and as the internet started kicking off people were crazy about laying bandwidth. Firms like Global Crossing we're laying cable all over the ocean floors and they laid too much cable and the cable became dark, the fiber became dark, and firms like Global Crossing, Enron, Enron went under really as a result of that miss allocation. And so it occurred to me these utility tokens now are very similar in characteristic except to produce a utility token you don't have to rent a boat and lay cable on the ocean floor in order to produce one of these utility tokens, that everybody's buying, I mean it takes literally minutes to produce a token. So in a nutshell it's too many damn tokens. It was like the peak of the internet, which we were all involved in. It occurred to me then in January of 2000 the market was demanding internet shares and the market was really good at producing internet shares, too many of them, and it went down. So I think we're in a similar situation with cryptocurrency, the Wall Street did come in, there were a hundred plus hedge funds of all shapes and sizes scrambling and buying crypto in the fall of last year. It's kind of like Napoleon's reason for attacking Russia, seemed like a good idea at the time. (laughing) And so we're now in a corrective phase but literally there's been too many tokens. There are so many tokens that we as humans can't even deal with that. >> And the outlook, what's the outlook for you? I mean, I'll see there's some systemic things going to be flushed out, but you long on certain areas? What do you what do you see as a bright light at the end of the tunnel or sort right in front of you? What's happening from a market that you're excited about? >> At a macro scale I think it's apparent that the internet deserves its own currency, of course it does and there will be an internet currency. The trick is which currency shall that be? Bitcoin was was a brilliant construct, the the inventor of Bitcoin should get a Nobel Prize, and I hope she does. (laughing) >> 'Cause Satoshi is female, everyone knows that. (laughing) >> I got that from you actually. (laughing) But it may not be Bitcoin and that's why we have to be a little sanguine here. You know, people got a little bit too optimistic, Bitcoin's going to a hundred grand, no it's going to five hundred grand. I mean, those are all red flags based on my experience of trading on the floor and investing in hedge funds. Bitcoin, I think I'm disappointed in Bitcoins adoption, you know it's still very difficult to use Bitcoin and I was hoping by now that that would be a different scenario but it really isn't. Very few people use Bitcoin in their daily lives. I do, I've been paying my son his allowance for years in Bitcoin. Son of a bitch is rich now. (laughing) >> Damn, so on terms of like the long game, you seeing the developers adopted a theory and that was classic, you know the decentralized applications. We're here at a Cloud Blockchain kind of convergence conference where developers mattered on the Cloud. You saw a great developer, stakeholders with Amazon, Cloud native, certainly there's a lot of developers trying to make things easier, faster, smarter, with crypto. >> Yup. >> So, but all at the same time it's hard for developers. Hearing things like EOS coming on, trying to get developers. So there's a race for developer adoption, this is a major factor in some of the success and price drops too. Your thoughts on, you know the impact, has that changed anything? I mean, the Ethereum at the lowest it's been all year. >> Yup. Yeah well, that was that was fairly predictable and I've talked about that at number of talks I've given. There's only one thing that all of these ICOs have had in common, they're long Ethereum. They own Ethereum, and many of those projects, even out the the few ICO projects that I've selectively been advising I begged them to do once they raised their money in Ethereum is to convert it into cash. I said you're not in the Ethereum business, you're in whatever business that you're in. Many of them ported on to that stake, again caught up in the excitement about the the potential price appreciation but they lost track of what business they were really in. They were speculating in Ethereum. Yeah, I said they might as well been speculating in Apple stock. >> They could have done better then Ethereum. >> Much better. >> Too much supply, too many damn tokens, and they're easy to make. That's the issue. >> Yeah. >> And you've got lots of people making them. When one of the first guys I met in this space was Vitalik Buterin, he was 18 at the time and I remember meeting him I thought, this is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. It was a really fun meeting. I remember when the meeting ended and I walked away I was about 35 feet away and he LinkedIn with me. Which I thought was cute. >> That's awesome, talk about what you're investing-- >> But, now there's probably a thousand Vitalik Buterin's in the space. Many of them are at this conference. >> And a lot of people have plans. >> Super smart, great ideas, and boom, token. >> And they're producing new tokens. They're all better improved, they're borrowing the best attributes of each but we've got too many damn tokens. It's hard for us humans to be able to keep track of that. It's almost like requiring a complicated new browser download for every website you went to. We just can't do that. >> Is the analog, you remember the dot com days, you referred to it earlier, there was quality, and the quality lasted, sustained, you know, the Amazon's, the eBay's, the PayPal's, etc, are there analogs in this market, in your view, can you sniff out the sort of quality? >> There are definitely analogs, I think, but I think one of the greatest metrics that we can we can look at is that utility token being utilized? Not many of them are being utilized. I was giving a talk last month, 350 people in the audience, and I said show of hands, how many people have used a utility token this year? One hand went up. I go, Ethereum? Ethereum. Will we be using utility tokens in the future? Of course we will but it's going to have to get a whole lot easier for us humans to be able to deal with them, and understand them, and not lose them, that's the big issue. This is just as much a cybersecurity play as it is a digital currency play. >> Elaborate on that, that thought, why is more cyber security playing? >> Well, I've had an extensive background in cyber security as an investor, my mantra since 9/11 has been to invest in catalyze companies that impact the security of the homeland. A wide variety of security plays but primarily, cyber security. It occurred to me that the most valuable data in the world used to be in the Pentagon. That's no longer the case. Two reasons basically, one, the data has already been stolen. (laughing) Not funny. Two, if you steal the plans for the next generation F39 Joint Strike Force fighter, good for you, there's only two buyers. (laughing) The most valuable data in the world today, as we sit here, is a Bitcoin private key, and they're coming for them. Prominent Bitcoin holders are being hunted, kidnapped, extorted, I mean it's a rather extraordinary thing. So the cybersecurity aspect of if all of our assets are going to be digitized you better damn well keep those keys secure and so that's why I've been focused on the cybersecurity aspect. Rivets, one of the ICOs that I invested in is developing software that turns on the power of the hardware TPM, trusted execution environment, that's already on your phone. It's a place to hold keys in hardware. So that becomes fundamentally important in holding your keys. >> I mean certainly we heard stories about kidnapping that private key, I mean still how do you protect that? That's a good question, that's a really interesting question. Is it like consensus, do you have multiple people involved, do you get beaten up until you hand over your private key? >> It's been happening. It's been happening. >> What about the security token versus utility tokens? A lot of tokens now, so there's yeah, too many tokens on the utility side, but now there's a surge towards security tokens, and Greg Bettinger wrote this morning that the market has changed over and the investor side's looking more and more like traditional in structures and companies, raising money. So security token has been a, I think relief for some people in the US for sure around investing in structures they understand. Is that a real dynamic or is that going to sustain itself? How do you see security tokens? >> And we heard in the panel this morning, you were in there, where they were predicting the future of the valuation of the security tokens by the end of the year doubling, tripling, what ever it was, but what are your thoughts? >> I think security tokens are going to be the next big thing, they have so many advantages to what we now regard as share certificates. My most exciting project is that I'm heavily involved in is a project called the Entanglement Institute. That's going to, in the process of issuing security infrastructure tokens, so our idea is a public-private partnership with the US government to build the first mega quantum computing center in Newport, Rhode Island. Now the private part of the public-private partnership by the issuance of tokens you have tremendous advantages to the way securities are issued now, transparency, liquidity. Infrastructure investments are not very liquid, and if they were made more liquid more people would buy them. It occurred to me it would have been a really good idea if grandpa would have invested in the Hoover Dam. Didn't have the chance. We think that there's a substantial demand of US citizens that would love to invest in our own country and would do so if it were more liquid, if it was more transparent, if the costs were less of issuing those tokens. >> More efficient, yeah. >> So you see that as a potential way to fund public infrastructure build-outs? >> It will be helpful if infrastructure is financed in the future. >> How do you see the structure on the streets, this comes up all the time, there's different answers to this. There's not like there's one, we've seen multiple but I'm putting a security token, what am i securing against, cash flow, equity, right to convert to utility tokens? So we're starting to see a variety of mechanisms, 'cause you have to investor a security outcome. >> Yeah, so as an investor, what do you look for? >> Well, I think it's almost limitless of what these smart securities, you know can be capable of, for example one of the things that were that we're talking with various parts of the government is thinking about the tax credit. The tax credit that have been talked about at the Trump administration, that could be really changed on its head if you were able to use smart securities, if you will. Who says that the tax credit for a certain project has to be the same as all other projects? The president has promised a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure investment program and so far he's only 1.5 trillion away from the goal. It hasn't started yet. Wilbur Ross when, in the transition team, I had seen the white paper that he had written, was suggesting an 82% tax credit for infrastructure investment. I'm going 82%, oh my God, I've never. It's an unfathomable number. If it were 82% it would be the strongest fiscal stimulus of your lifetime and it's a crazy number, it's too big. And then I started thinking about it, maybe an 82% tax credit is warranted for a critical infrastructure as important as quantum computing or cyber security. >> Cyber security. >> Exactly, very good point, and maybe the tax credit is 15% for another bridge over the Mississippi River. We already got those. So a smart infrastructure token would allow the Larry Kudlow to turn the dial and allow economic incentive to differ based on the importance of the project. >> The value of the project. >> That is a big idea. >> That is a big idea. >> That is what we're working on. >> That is a big idea, that is a smart contract, smart securities that have allocations, and efficiencies, and incentives that aren't perverse or generic. >> It aligns with the value of the society he needs, right. Talk about quantum computing more, the potential, why quantum, what attracted you to quantum? What do you see as the future of quantum computing? >> You know, you don't you don't have to own very much Bitcoin before what wakes you up in the middle of the night is quantum computing. It's a hundred million times faster than computing as we know it today. The reason that I'm involved in this project, I believe it's a matter of national security that we form a national initiative to gain quantum supremacy, or I call it data supremacy. And right now we're lagging, the Chinese have focused on this acutely and are actually ahead, I believe of the United States. And it's going to take a national initiative, it's going to take a Manhattan Project, and that's that's really what Entanglement Institute is, is a current day Manhattan Project partnering with government and three-letter agencies, private industry, we have to hunt as a pack and focus on this or we're going to be left behind. >> And that's where that's based out of. >> Newport, Rhode Island. >> And so you got some DC presence in there too? >> Yes lots of DC presence, this is being called Quantum summer in Washington DC. Many are crediting the Entanglement Institute for that because they've been up and down the halls of Congress and DOD and other-- >> Love to introduce you to Bob Picciano, Cube alumni who heads up quantum computing for IBM, would be a great connection. They're doing trying to work their, great chips to building, open that up. Bradley thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Always great to see you, impeccable vision, you've got a great vision. I love the big ideas, smart securities, it's coming, that is, I think very clear. >> Thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. The Cube coverage here live in Toronto. The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, more live coverage, day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Blockchain futurist conference. This is the first global Cloud Blockchain Summit here kicking off the whole week. Stay with us for more after this short break.