The popular explanation — “it tries all the answers at once” — is wrong in a way that makes everything downstream impossible to reason about. Here is a description that is merely simplified rather than false.
All Quantum Computing →
Classical computers correct errors by copying a bit and taking a majority vote. Quantum mechanics forbids copying an unknown state, so quantum error correction works differently: many physical qubits are combined to encode one logical qubit, and errors are detected by measuring properties that reveal an error occurred without revealing the encoded state itself.
The cost is the headline. Encoding one reliable logical qubit takes a large number of physical ones, and the ratio depends on the error rate of the underlying hardware. This is why a machine advertised with a large physical qubit count is not doing large computations: after error correction, the number of logical qubits available is very much smaller. When you read a qubit count, the useful question is always whether it is physical or logical, and the answer is nearly always physical.
Progress here is real. Demonstrations that a logical qubit can be made more reliable than its physical constituents — crossing the error-correction threshold — are genuine milestones, and the field has been crossing them. What has not happened is a machine with enough logical qubits and circuit depth to run a commercially interesting algorithm. Anyone offering a date for that is guessing, including the people building them.
No, and the phrase does more damage than any other in this field. The register is described by many amplitudes simultaneously, but measurement yields one outcome. Value comes only from arranging interference so wrong answers cancel. Without that arrangement — which exists for very few problems — you get noise.
For cryptographically relevant factoring, published estimates run from around a million physical qubits upward under current error-correction overheads, and they keep falling. For useful chemistry simulation, far fewer but still well beyond what exists. The honest answer to any qubit-count question is to ask whether the number is physical or logical, because the two differ by orders of magnitude.
Superconducting circuits, trapped ions, neutral atoms and photonics are the main ones, and they trade off differently on gate speed, coherence time, connectivity and manufacturability. No approach has clearly won, which is itself informative about the field's maturity.
Most quantum vendor claims fail on one of two questions. Knowing which two is the useful outcome here.
30-minute technical call · no deck
What we built, what stage it is at, and a link to the live thing wherever there is one.
yourOS is an operating system with an AI at its heart. You talk to it like a person, out loud or typed. It makes your calls, plans your days and works on your projects with a crew of agents, on your own private server. Our own product, built from the first commit; the waitlist is open.
Website, backend and app assets for Sonora, a free AI sound-therapy app on iOS and Android published by Cognitive AI.
Brand, website, prototype, apps on five platforms, the AI backend and the algorithm-intelligence pipeline for Podswap, a social growth engine that runs without a human in the loop.
In closed beta: Roxy, a private AI assistant with permanent memory running on infrastructure the user owns. Brand, site, product, backend and conversational design.
Live at coherence.com: brand identity generated with AI agents we directed, the motion system and website for the group behind Sonora, AboutAI, WakeUp and MudShadows. Agent work remains in build.
Live at domainbooth.com for DomainBooth, a premium domain brokerage: a new animated mark, every page redesigned and rebuilt with designed mobile layouts, and a custom CMS for its sales record, featured names, press and enquiries.
Apps, platforms and campaigns for these teams, long before the AI work. Every one is written up on the work page — what we did, and where our part ended.
