Letter to a Jewish voter in Pennsylvania

Apparently Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, opined on an analyst call this week that quantum computing was plausibly still twenty years away from being practical. As a direct result, a bunch of publicly-traded quantum computing companies (including IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave) fell 40% or more in value, and even Google/Alphabet stock fell on the […]

Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should We Feel?” and also closing the conference via an Ask-Us-Anything session with John Preskill. (If you’re at Q2B, reader, come and say hi!) And to […]

Do you like watching me spout about AI alignment, watermarking, my time at OpenAI, the P versus NP problem, quantum computing, consciousness, Penrose’s views on physics and uncomputability, university culture, wokeness, free speech, my academic trajectory, and much more, despite my slightly spastic demeanor and my many verbal infelicities? Then...

I’m thankful to the thousands of readers of this blog.  Well, not the few submit troll comments from multiple pseudonymous handles, but the 99.9% who don’t. I’m thankful that they’ve stayed here even when events (as they do more and more often) send me into a spiral of doomscrolling and just subsisting hour-to-hour—when I’m left […]

I was sure my next post would be about the election—the sword of Damocles hanging over the United States and civilization as a whole. Instead, I have sad news, but also news that brings memories of warmth, humor, and complexity-theoretic insight. Steven Rudich—professor at Carnegie Mellon, central figure of theoretical computer science since the...