Automating qubit tune-up, from Oxford to a year in Sydney

Yeah, and you know, yeah, just it was different. I was studying engineering alloys. I was like, well, okay, let's get to the grips of the base of this problem. So I applied for this PhD, which was think the original title was like read out of quantum devices or quantum semiconductor devices and worked on my PhD. The first few weeks were some of the most painful weeks. of the PhD because I quickly realized that despite looking and watching these videos of Google and IBM, you know, saying, we have 10 qubits at the time or 50 qubits. A lot of the work to get those qubits was done completely manually. And there I was with a different technology. So these semiconductor chips also doing manual work, trying to get one qubit. And it took me weeks to just get like halfway along that journey. And I said to my supervisor, Natalia said, like, never again, sorry. Like, this is crazy. Yeah, like I want to pass the PhD. I don't want to be here in a twiddling knobs. And she looked at me like, you know, what? Like, this is how it's done. But also she was like, well, look, we're, you know, we're thinking about automating this, this whole process. Maybe you look more into that. You know, I have another PhD student looking at that.

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And so I went down the automation route of, how can I automate what I was doing in the lab of turning these voltage dials, you know, looking at the current signature and saying, that looks like a potential qubit that isn't. And I did that for the next four years, but it was, was very, you know, academic. was, okay, this would be cool. You have the narrative of it will help scale this technology. But it wasn't until the last year where I went out to Sydney and, you know, worked in a lab there. It was with a professor Andrea Morello who was like, look, know, the software would be great if you could help us speed up experiments. And you know, went out there for six weeks, showed how it worked. like, you know, maybe stay a bit longer. I ended up staying for a whole year. I also worked through the quantum company T-Rack out there and helped them understand their qubits a bit more using AI tools that we built. And so I was like, oh, maybe there's more to this than just academia. This is actually critical in building the hardware. And that's when I went back to Oxford and met my co-founder, who was also working on a similar thing, was automation of these systems. we're like, you know, I just walked into the office. was like, who wants to build a quantum computer? And he stood up. He's like, yeah, I do. let's chat. And so Joel and I, went upstairs and said, look, you know, this is what we think we can do. This is what, why we think it should be done this way. And, you know, the rest was kind of history. think the big thing that we aligned on was really believing in how AI and automation can help scale this technology. And the key word is scale. We weren't really thinking about getting one or two qubits and then three and then four. We were really thinking about from the beginning, what's required to make a million qubit machine, because that's actually what's required to, you know, get this technology out of a place where it's useful for people.