AI transcript
0:00:05 Hi everyone, welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I’m Sonal, and I’m here today with the 10th episode
0:00:10 of our short form news show, 16 Minutes, where we cover recent headlines the A6NZ way.
0:00:15 This week, we cover multiple topics, Amazon’s virtual care, what it means for incumbents and
0:00:20 startups, and the future of healthcare. Then we do a quick take on Oculus Connect and where are we
0:00:25 with VR and AR. And finally, we discuss the leaked paper slash news that Google may have achieved
0:00:30 quantum supremacy. What does it mean? Where are we with quantum computing? But first, please be
0:00:34 sure to subscribe to 16 Minutes separately in your podcast app, just search for it there,
0:00:39 because we will no longer be dropping this show here, at least regularly, that is,
0:00:46 in the main A6NZ podcast feed. So go subscribe now. I always include links and relevant references
0:00:52 or background that’s mentioned in the show notes. And you can find those at A6NZ.com/16Minutes.
0:00:56 And finally, please note that none of the following is investment advice or intended
0:01:02 for investors. Please be sure to see A6NZ.com/disclosures for important information.
0:01:08 So the first segment of this week’s episode is about the news that Amazon just launched something
0:01:12 called Amazon Care, which was described as a virtual medical clinic for employees. And what
0:01:17 that really is is a combination of telemedicine and targeted in-home follow-ups. And I think
0:01:21 it’s really significant that it’s for employees because previously, Amazon joined up with JPMorgan
0:01:24 and Berkshire Hathaway. And the reason they did this is because they’re like, we need to move
0:01:29 the needle on how expensive healthcare is as employers covering this. They have 1.2 million
0:01:34 employees combined, so they basically banded forces to figure out this problem. And Amazon
0:01:39 had also acquired Pillpack, which is an online pharmacy. And so all these pieces are kind of
0:01:45 coming together. And so let me now welcome our A6NZ experts, A6NZ bio partners, Jorge Conde and Julie
0:01:50 Yu. It’s great to be here, Sonal. Thanks for having us. So let’s talk about this news. Why do we care?
0:01:54 Well, I think the reason to care about this is really, I’d say, as you pointed out, the cost
0:02:00 of healthcare continues to go up. They just published a report that the cost of employer-based
0:02:06 healthcare just topped $20,000 for a family plan annually. And employers bear about 70% of that
0:02:10 cost. So that’s one important sort of trend that is driving a lot of this. The other one, which
0:02:16 is to some extent related, is consumers are being asked to bear more and more of the cost of their
0:02:21 care out of pocket as well. So the average consumer is investing something north of $6,000 a year to
0:02:24 there in their family’s healthcare. And so I think what’s particularly interesting about this is you
0:02:31 have a large employer that also has the ability to deploy technology coming up with a solution
0:02:36 for their employees initially, but if history is any guide here, this is also testing ground.
0:02:40 I think another interesting thing of significance from the incumbent lens is we often hear from
0:02:44 whether it be payers or providers or even self-insured employers as they’re having strategic
0:02:48 dialogue about their healthcare operations. Oftentimes the question comes up, what does
0:02:53 Amazon’s presence in the healthcare market mean for me? And oftentimes those conversations end by
0:02:57 saying, well, at least Amazon’s not delivering healthcare. And so that excuse has now been
0:03:01 officially taken off the table. And by the way, it’s worth noting that Amazon is not the first
0:03:06 employer to do this. I think it’s more Amazon’s position in the market as a key consumer-facing
0:03:11 brand. That’s really what has been the source of fear for many of these organizations.
0:03:14 Well, even something like AWS, Amazon Web Services, was something they built internally
0:03:19 for their own use that then became something they opened up to a ton of startups. And so
0:03:23 what it ended up enabling was this whole new wave of companies being built. So if they do open up
0:03:29 these services in the future, who knows what’s possible. Exactly. There are at least two vectors
0:03:33 that you could see this taking. One is Amazon actually turning this into a direct to consumer
0:03:38 service or taking more of that AWS approach and going B to B and saying, we’re now going to be
0:03:43 selling a benefit. One of the things that’s really interesting here is that they’re providing care,
0:03:48 but they’re doing that through contract so that they haven’t hired nurses and physicians.
0:03:52 Is a company called Oasis or something? A company called Oasis.
0:03:56 So what you’re also winning out then with the partnering side is that they essentially right
0:03:59 now are buying versus building or at least partnering versus building. And that’s really
0:04:03 interesting because Amazon at core is a tech company. So why wouldn’t they be building this
0:04:06 tech themselves? Do you have any thoughts on this whole bill versus buy aspect of their moves?
0:04:10 There’s a virtual care component, which certainly is technology enabled.
0:04:14 There is a home visit component, which is human clinical services. And then there’s
0:04:19 the pharmacy component, which is really what people believe to be pill pack sort of repackaged.
0:04:24 And I would say the first and the third of that certainly are tech and Amazon has built the first
0:04:28 and then acquired essentially the third. I think it’s really that middle piece why people were
0:04:32 skeptical that Amazon was going to get into healthcare is that the clinical service delivery
0:04:37 operations is really the most complex part of that, you know, having on the ground services to
0:04:42 enable nurses to walk into people’s homes and have the right equipment. So that piece intuitively
0:04:46 makes sense for this organization to actually sort of bring through a partnership.
0:04:50 But that is also, you know, something that people will be watching very closely is
0:04:55 will Amazon actually backwards integrate into those services ultimately themselves?
0:04:58 I think there’s also an assumption one can make here in that tech and bucket that you lay out
0:05:04 really that there is an incredible lift that one could get from technology in terms of helping
0:05:08 with the coordination of care, scheduling it and scaling it. Yeah, because I mean,
0:05:12 I think one of the things that is incredibly true about healthcare is we know it’s very analog
0:05:17 still. And so the things that get down on the board. Exactly. So I think, I mean, it’d be
0:05:23 interesting to see how and if Amazon is helping to essentially supercharge or power oasis in this
0:05:28 whole delivery. I have a question though, just to push back, which is this is all very tech-centric.
0:05:33 What would the counterpart be to sort of saying the realities of how healthcare really works?
0:05:37 Yeah, it’s a great point, Sonal. And I think some of the challenges that one would kind of see
0:05:42 around a business like this are, you know, the very reasons why sort of tech only companies
0:05:47 haven’t been able to scale historically. So certainly one is how do you sort of integrate
0:05:51 yourself into the supply chain of the broader healthcare landscape? Because at the end of
0:05:55 the day, the services that Amazon is providing now are primary care. They’re not doing anything
0:05:59 related to specialty care, certainly anything that’s related to sort of procedural surgical
0:06:03 services that would require you to go into a hospital, et cetera. And when you look at actually
0:06:08 the distribution of spend, primary care is really a small component of that. And so in
0:06:13 order to truly get at the even the cost equation, let alone the overall, how do you manage a patient’s
0:06:17 entire healthcare experience? This is really only scratching the surface.
0:06:22 So then honestly, is there room when you have huge players like this, like for startups? I mean,
0:06:26 at the end of the day, we always say that every small niche in healthcare is at least a billion
0:06:32 dollars wide. It’s such a massive market. Primary care alone is a $220 billion market opportunity.
0:06:35 And so I believe that it will not be a winner take on market, especially given some of the
0:06:39 characteristics of how you need to scale a business like this. And when we look at, you know,
0:06:43 these sort of novel primary care models, there’s a few questions that we will ask, you know,
0:06:48 one is, how does this service get distribution? That is oftentimes the hardest part of building
0:06:54 businesses in healthcare is you’re really fighting against very, very heavily ensconced
0:06:57 incumbents. I mean, to get around those channels or build new channels is very, very difficult.
0:07:02 I love, by the way, Alex Rumpel’s line, which is that the game for startups is to get distribution
0:07:07 before the incumbent gets innovation that nails that. Exactly. I mean, so that’s, you know,
0:07:10 sort of one thing to think about. The second thing is, you know, how does whatever upstart
0:07:14 company sort of integrate itself into the broader supply chain of healthcare? And that could be
0:07:18 through referral relationships, you know, how do you build a referral network and sort of
0:07:22 overcome some of the barriers to becoming essentially a new market entrant? And then
0:07:27 the third piece is scale on sort of a geographic basis. And healthcare is one of those sort of
0:07:32 businesses where just because you have a contract with a payer in a given sort of market or state,
0:07:37 that means nothing for reducing friction as you’re trying to enter into other geographies.
0:07:41 And so I think that step by step, that brute force model of how you sort of build
0:07:47 reach is challenging. Amazon, if they were to bundle this as an offering with something like
0:07:52 an Amazon Prime, you know, distribution becomes a no brainer. I think the downside for them will
0:07:57 arise from, you know, what about all of the data and how will my privacy be affected?
0:08:01 What is a future that it takes us to, we’ve been talking about the news so far, like, what’s the
0:08:06 big picture of what happens next in healthcare when there’s things like this new virtual care?
0:08:10 I think it pretends what the future of healthcare might look like. In a lot of ways, it’s becoming
0:08:15 much more of a decentralized thing. And so you can get healthcare in a retail setting,
0:08:18 whether it’s a minute clinic, you can get healthcare at home, whether it’s telepresence,
0:08:22 whether it’s home visits. I think what we’re going to see is, you know, in many ways healthcare,
0:08:28 you know, is leaving the building, healthcare is leaving the pill bottle. And many ways healthcare
0:08:32 is leaving the traditional idea of, you know, having a medicine back in that, you know,
0:08:39 now we have technology like iPhones that can do an increasing number of ways to detect health and
0:08:44 disease. You know, an Apple Watch can now act as an EKG. And so, you know, there’s so many things
0:08:47 that are coming together, I think we’re going to hopefully have a very positive impact on our
0:08:51 healthcare system. Healthcare is leaving the building, the bag and the bottle. So bottom line it for
0:08:55 me. Yeah, I think what Amazon is doing will be what, you know, large employers will start to do.
0:09:00 I also think that it is a sort of a forcing function for people to recognize that this
0:09:04 is now a thing, that this will be a category of how care is delivered, certainly at the lower
0:09:09 cutie ends of the spectrum, versus more specialty care and higher need. And startups have plenty
0:09:14 of market opportunity left across the service area of healthcare to innovate in similar ways
0:09:18 from the bottoms up. Well, thank you guys for joining this segment of 16 Minutes.
0:09:22 Okay, so for our next segment, I asked Asics and the General Partner, Chris Dixon, for his quick
0:09:27 take on Facebook’s annual developer event, Oculus Connect 6, which just took place this past week,
0:09:33 and what it means for VR virtual reality and AR augmented reality. And Dixon, as you go through
0:09:36 and just quickly summarize the news, quickly share the broad implication of each.
0:09:42 Yeah, so Oculus made a number of announcements. To me, the TLDR is they continue to advance
0:09:48 VR and AR at a very rapid rate. There’s the Oculus Quest, which is their marquee device right now.
0:09:52 It’s really kind of a game changer. And I think really has the potential to go mainstream. And
0:09:55 they actually said that the event that they are selling them as fast as they can make them,
0:10:00 they announced support for the Quest will now run PC VR games, which unlocks a whole bunch of
0:10:04 sort of new content. On the technical side, they’ve gotten full hand tracking working,
0:10:09 which means in the future won’t need to have the controllers in your hands. And also we’ll
0:10:13 have a much more granular ability to interact with the virtual world. I think of this in the
0:10:16 larger theme is what you’re going to see over time as you get rid of the controllers. And then
0:10:21 you see the headset shrinking and shrinking and eventually just simply be glasses that can do
0:10:26 both AR and VR functionality. And this is an important step along the way. They also announced
0:10:30 the Oculus Quest has some simple AR functionality where you can see through it’s called pass through
0:10:33 and they announced the pass through plus, which is kind of a more advanced version of that.
0:10:37 I think kind of signaling that they are thinking very much about kind of AR and VR converging
0:10:41 really they’re very similar technology where, you know, VR is when the real world is fully
0:10:46 occluded and AR is when you can see partly the virtual and the real world. Just a break
0:10:51 pass through down. So when you’re playing like VR game or just in a VR environment right now to
0:10:55 see the physical world, you actually have to take your headset off and then put it back on.
0:11:00 And so the significance of that is that when you talk about blending VR and AR, your point that you
0:11:04 actually can be immersed in the world and also have virtual world overlaid over the physical world.
0:11:08 Yeah. So one of the limits of VR now, like I’m a fan of VR, but like after an hour, there are some
0:11:13 things that are not optimal comfort wise. And so as you chip away at all those things, I think it
0:11:16 becomes a much more, first of all, much more social, like that’s one thing about VR. Like right now,
0:11:19 they have this cool thing where you can screencast and so people can see on their phone what you’re
0:11:24 seeing. And that makes it more social, but make it more inclusive, make it more open. So people
0:11:27 feel like they’re still in the room, but they’re having the full immersion. I mean, it’s, it’s,
0:11:31 there’s two sides of the coin. On the other hand, the whole benefit of VR is the deep immersion. So
0:11:33 you want that, but you also want, I think you want to balance. So that’s what they’re trying
0:11:37 to do with like the AR features and just the obvious things. They also announced some more
0:11:41 futuristic stuff. So for example, one thing that they’ve been working a lot on are what are called
0:11:44 verifocal lenses. Can you safely explain that? Yeah, just very briefly, it turns out there’s a
0:11:49 number of ways in which people see in 3D because, you know, you have two eyes and your brain puts
0:11:53 together the difference in what you see it. And VR is able to replicate that very well. If you want
0:11:57 to try it, it’s an app called Big Screen, which we’re investors in, where you can watch 3D movies
0:12:01 and you get a much more richer 3D effect than you do in the movie theater because you have true
0:12:05 eye separation. But it turns out there’s other ways in which your eyes see depth, not an expert
0:12:10 on this, but I’ll try. So what your eye expects is that when an object is farther away, the light
0:12:13 bends in a certain way. And right now in VR, it doesn’t happen that way, right? Because your
0:12:18 screen in front of you, it has an infinite focal distance is what the technologist would say.
0:12:22 And so one of the things they’ve now gotten working in the lab is something where you actually
0:12:27 can have a many dozens of layers of focal distance in the same headset. I would expect the next device
0:12:31 to have what’s called foveated rendering, which is basically fracture fovea, which is where your
0:12:36 eye is looking and render. So it turns out the way you look in real life is when you’re looking at
0:12:40 something, you see high res and the thing directly in front and then low res around it. And this is
0:12:44 your way of your brain kind of saving compute cycles. And so VR will do something similar where
0:12:49 you only render the center. Wait, so foveated rendering, if I understand correctly, it basically
0:12:55 trades off the broader field of view with higher resolution for where your eye is actually focusing
0:13:00 and not for focusing on things in the periphery as a way to trade off the available processing power.
0:13:05 Yeah. So for example, the Oculus Quest is running on a mobile processor, unlike the Oculus Rift,
0:13:09 which you have to physically plug into your PC and has much more GPU power. And so as a result,
0:13:15 if you look, you can see like less lighting effects, just simpler textures, things like that.
0:13:19 And that’s because the GPU is running at full speed. And it’s a mobile GPU. It’s amazing
0:13:22 that they could do this on a mobile GPU. The GPU is doing both inside out positional tracking,
0:13:27 which is itself a hard machine learning problem. And it’s rendering a full game engine and everything
0:13:31 else. And that’s just one of many things that are being advanced. And so a big question when you
0:13:36 have a new technologies, are you kind of following a linear or exponential path? And I think we’re
0:13:40 following an exponential path. We will be soon once we get the developer system really going.
0:13:48 The missing piece right now is enough users that developers can invest right now, the major kind
0:13:52 of game studios and other software developers don’t see it as a big enough platform. At some
0:13:56 point, we’ll hit that tipping point. There’s probably 10 million active users or something.
0:14:01 It needs to be in the billions and tens of billions. But all signs point to this technology
0:14:05 really getting rapidly better and Facebook driving the vast majority of it. There are other
0:14:09 companies doing cool stuff like Valve is doing some very cool stuff. Microsoft tested the HoloLens
0:14:12 and AR and things. I think they’re kind of betting more on enterprise use cases and AR.
0:14:16 Okay. So that’s a quick update at the device level and where we are, where we’re not in the trend.
0:14:21 Bottom line, for me, Dixon. The bottom line is this is going to be a major new platform,
0:14:24 I believe, and we’re seeing evidence of it. I think we went through the Trophotus
0:14:28 Illusion in VR and we’re coming out of it. And the rate of improvement is very quick.
0:14:34 I get the feeling watching Oculus Connect the way I used to watching the Steve Jobs Apple
0:14:38 Keynotes like today. It feels more incremental, frankly, on the mobile phone side. But here,
0:14:42 there’s like sort of genuine big breakthroughs. Fantastic. Well, thank you for joining this week’s
0:14:46 episode of 16 minutes. Thank you. So in this last segment, we’re going to talk about the
0:14:50 recent news. And honestly, I wouldn’t normally put this in the news because it’s really journal
0:14:54 article, but enough media headlines covered it that I want us to talk about it, which is this
0:15:01 paper apparently Google claims quantum supremacy. But here’s the funny part. The paper was accidentally
0:15:05 released by some of their collaborators at NASA who put it on their public website. So then it was
0:15:10 really quickly taken down. But in that period, a ton of media headlines hit about it. And just
0:15:15 to quickly summarize the news, so a group at Google achieved so-called quantum supremacy with a 53
0:15:21 qubit superconducting device. And a qubit just for definition is a quantum bit. And they’re doing
0:15:26 this with a quantum processor called Sycamore. And just a quick definition on what generally
0:15:30 people may define as quantum supremacy is just very simply put, it’s a point at which a quantum
0:15:35 computer surpasses classical computers for some specifics that are problems in a given domain.
0:15:38 And then there’s also some other recent news and movements. But what we really want to talk
0:15:43 about today is tease apart the facts from the fiction. Scott Aaronson, the professor at UT
0:15:46 Austin, who writes a lot about quantum computing, a blog post he wrote about the Google News. He had
0:15:51 this line that said, “Fact-free pontificating about what it means has predictably proliferated.”
0:15:56 So we’re here to unproliferate that. That voice you just heard is ASICS and Z-Bio General Partner
0:16:02 Vijay Pande, who has a PhD in physics, which is very relevant here, but also early in his lab at
0:16:07 Stanford did pioneering work on a distributed computing protein folding project called Folding
0:16:11 at Home. And it’s pioneering because it really pushed the boundaries of computing and was very
0:16:16 early to using GPUs. And by the way, just to quickly define what quantum computing is,
0:16:22 simply put, it’s a type of computing based on nature’s operating system of quantum mechanics.
0:16:28 So unlike classical computers, which are limited to human style binary code, quantum computers can
0:16:32 do things that classical computers can’t do or can’t do fast enough. And this is really important,
0:16:37 especially as Moore’s Law continues to achieve in seemingly impossible feats. At some point,
0:16:40 it really hits its limits. And that’s where quantum computers come in. But people have been
0:16:45 talking about them for ages, and they also always tend to go right to the saying, “Oh no,
0:16:49 once this happens, all our cryptography will break too.” So what’s your quick take there, Vijay?
0:16:52 So what’s interesting here is that there are some people who think that this is nothing,
0:16:56 and that’s wrong actually. And then some people think this is in the world, and that’s wrong too.
0:17:02 So is quantum computing real? Is it here? Yes. Now, does this mean that cryptography is broken?
0:17:07 Does this mean that classical computers aren’t useful? That part is not true. And I think
0:17:12 supremacy is a term that really maybe is a little bit grander than it needs to be.
0:17:15 Yeah. Actually, can we talk about this? Because people get really caught up in it. And I think
0:17:19 it’s one of the funniest jokes I’ve heard about the term quantum supremacy. Someone once told me
0:17:23 that it’s a way for Google to convince management that they’re doing good work. Because it gives
0:17:27 like the managers like, “How do you even do milestones and really cutting edge work like
0:17:31 quantum computing?” But the other thing that is, you’ve actually coined this concept of a quantum
0:17:35 intercept when we wrote about our investment in reggae computing. And I’ve also heard the term
0:17:40 quantum in imitability. And also like reguettis use the term quantum advantage. I think quantum
0:17:47 supremacy is a big way to say that you can run a calculation on a quantum computer faster than
0:17:51 whatever that calculation would be on a classical machine. It doesn’t have to be
0:17:56 a calculation that any of us would ever want to run or need to run. It can do it better basically.
0:17:59 And just to be clear, this can be very different for very different types of problems in different
0:18:03 domains. That number of qubits required to do it is very different across all of them.
0:18:08 Absolutely. You told me about the part that isn’t type. Can you tell me the part that doesn’t work
0:18:12 about this? Okay, so here’s what you can do. It definitely isn’t a general purpose machine. You
0:18:16 couldn’t run any sort of calculation on it. But you know, GPUs are like that too, in a sense. And
0:18:20 then the second thing that it isn’t is that people have been saying, “Oh, now cryptography is broken
0:18:28 and Google can do this and that.” That is not the case. When people talk about a quantum computer,
0:18:32 they mean different things. And this is part of the problem. And so when some people talk about
0:18:38 quantum computers, they mean error correcting or noiseless quantum computers. And what Google
0:18:43 and IBM and Raghetti are working on is sort of near intermediate sort of noisy quantum computers.
0:18:46 Are you talking about NISC, like noisy intermediate scale quantum?
0:18:47 Yes.
0:18:52 And in layman’s terms, is it basically the idea like how to basically get useful information
0:18:53 out of a crazy quantum machine?
0:18:56 It has a little bit of noise, but there’s a lot of things you can do to work around that.
0:19:01 And so in that sense, it’s maybe almost a little bit more similar to analog computing in the early
0:19:05 days where noise doesn’t have to be a problem, but you have to have clever algorithms.
0:19:08 And there’s several clever algorithms that run on these NISC-style machines,
0:19:10 but cryptography is not one of them.
0:19:14 And so here’s why this is interesting. You talked about the early folding home days.
0:19:19 When we first coded on GPUs before CUDA or languages for GPUs were common, we were one
0:19:24 quarter the speed of a CPU. And a lot of people in my lab were kind of disappointed about this.
0:19:29 I was excited because what happens is that when you have two curves and one is going faster than
0:19:33 the other with the GPU curve going faster in the CPU curve, just the fact that you could
0:19:37 get this to work means that in a relatively short period of time it will become dominant.
0:19:41 It’s interesting you mentioned from CPU to GPU because people have talked about also
0:19:46 TPUs like tensor processor unit, but then after that a QPU, a quantum processing unit.
0:19:48 Well, the QPU and a quantum computer are one of the same.
0:19:52 So quantum computers are a very different approach to computing in that instead of doing
0:19:57 calculations with a typical processor, you’re essentially running a quantum experiment
0:19:58 with these multiple qubits.
0:19:59 And why would you bother?
0:20:03 So just concretely, what are the early applications where this might play out?
0:20:07 Yeah, the early applications that people are thinking about are one in areas of actually
0:20:12 doing quantum mechanics calculations, but also there’s a whole burgeoning area of
0:20:18 quantum machine learning. Basically, the non-linearity of quantum mechanics allows a much simpler
0:20:22 version of quantum machine learning to reproduce what you normally have to do in a much more
0:20:25 complex way with classical machine learning. And of course, you know, in the world I care
0:20:28 about engineering biology, now we can finally engineer it in some aspects that we can’t
0:20:32 today. So quantum mechanics is the world of molecules as it is. And so being able to finally
0:20:37 calculate that is entering to a world where we can apply engineering like principles
0:20:39 into areas that we just can’t right now.
0:20:42 So then let’s go back to this idea of quantum supremacy. So give me your quick take on, do
0:20:45 you think it’s just BS and some hypey thing or is it like a real thing?
0:20:50 I think it’s real that they’ve been actually able to run a bonafide algorithm on a machine
0:20:54 of that scale. So I think that’s impressive. And I think what this hopefully does is take
0:20:58 people who are quantum skeptics and make them realize that there actually is something here.
0:21:02 The other part that I think is really, really important to emphasize is that
0:21:07 it’s not like we’re jumping from one Moore’s law curve to another that’s going a little faster.
0:21:11 If Moore’s law says the power of the machine doubles like roughly every year, the quantum
0:21:16 machine, its power is exponential in the number of qubits for certain types of applications.
0:21:21 And so we’re GPUs, we just had a faster version of Moore’s law from CPU to QPU is the paradigm
0:21:25 shift. It’s a completely different game. This is something like it’s a completely different law.
0:21:29 Well, to break down concretely with the implication for people building software and anything that’s
0:21:35 relying on computing, it means that if that law plays out, the surprise of when people hit that
0:21:40 moment of quantum supremacy, intercept, advantage, whatever label we put it will happen much faster
0:21:43 when you think nothing happens all of a sudden. Oh my God, it’s there.
0:21:48 That’s exactly right. You know, people are making analogies for this to Sputnik. You know, Sputnik
0:21:53 was just a very simple satellite, but there was a lot more to come. Scott Aronson actually
0:21:57 likens it to the Wright brothers and it’s the perfect example. This is exactly what you said.
0:22:00 It’s not here, but it’s also not not here because the Wright brothers, there was all these false
0:22:04 starts, but then they actually did learn how to fly. You and I just talked about this a couple
0:22:08 of weeks ago on 16 minutes. There’s always a hybrid phase when you’re doing really cutting edge stuff.
0:22:11 Absolutely. So we talked about these different types of machines. There’s like the noiseless
0:22:15 machine. There’s the NISC machine. You could actually think about a third type of architecture
0:22:20 where you combine some aspects of quantum and classical. Anyway, when you run on a GPU, you
0:22:24 never run just on the GPU. It’s a GPU and the CPU working together. Exactly.
0:22:29 And some parts are there on the CPU, some parts on the GPU. So a CPU-QPU hybrid makes a ton of
0:22:33 sense, especially now. Fantastic. Thank you for joining the segment. Great. Thank you.
0:00:10 of our short form news show, 16 Minutes, where we cover recent headlines the A6NZ way.
0:00:15 This week, we cover multiple topics, Amazon’s virtual care, what it means for incumbents and
0:00:20 startups, and the future of healthcare. Then we do a quick take on Oculus Connect and where are we
0:00:25 with VR and AR. And finally, we discuss the leaked paper slash news that Google may have achieved
0:00:30 quantum supremacy. What does it mean? Where are we with quantum computing? But first, please be
0:00:34 sure to subscribe to 16 Minutes separately in your podcast app, just search for it there,
0:00:39 because we will no longer be dropping this show here, at least regularly, that is,
0:00:46 in the main A6NZ podcast feed. So go subscribe now. I always include links and relevant references
0:00:52 or background that’s mentioned in the show notes. And you can find those at A6NZ.com/16Minutes.
0:00:56 And finally, please note that none of the following is investment advice or intended
0:01:02 for investors. Please be sure to see A6NZ.com/disclosures for important information.
0:01:08 So the first segment of this week’s episode is about the news that Amazon just launched something
0:01:12 called Amazon Care, which was described as a virtual medical clinic for employees. And what
0:01:17 that really is is a combination of telemedicine and targeted in-home follow-ups. And I think
0:01:21 it’s really significant that it’s for employees because previously, Amazon joined up with JPMorgan
0:01:24 and Berkshire Hathaway. And the reason they did this is because they’re like, we need to move
0:01:29 the needle on how expensive healthcare is as employers covering this. They have 1.2 million
0:01:34 employees combined, so they basically banded forces to figure out this problem. And Amazon
0:01:39 had also acquired Pillpack, which is an online pharmacy. And so all these pieces are kind of
0:01:45 coming together. And so let me now welcome our A6NZ experts, A6NZ bio partners, Jorge Conde and Julie
0:01:50 Yu. It’s great to be here, Sonal. Thanks for having us. So let’s talk about this news. Why do we care?
0:01:54 Well, I think the reason to care about this is really, I’d say, as you pointed out, the cost
0:02:00 of healthcare continues to go up. They just published a report that the cost of employer-based
0:02:06 healthcare just topped $20,000 for a family plan annually. And employers bear about 70% of that
0:02:10 cost. So that’s one important sort of trend that is driving a lot of this. The other one, which
0:02:16 is to some extent related, is consumers are being asked to bear more and more of the cost of their
0:02:21 care out of pocket as well. So the average consumer is investing something north of $6,000 a year to
0:02:24 there in their family’s healthcare. And so I think what’s particularly interesting about this is you
0:02:31 have a large employer that also has the ability to deploy technology coming up with a solution
0:02:36 for their employees initially, but if history is any guide here, this is also testing ground.
0:02:40 I think another interesting thing of significance from the incumbent lens is we often hear from
0:02:44 whether it be payers or providers or even self-insured employers as they’re having strategic
0:02:48 dialogue about their healthcare operations. Oftentimes the question comes up, what does
0:02:53 Amazon’s presence in the healthcare market mean for me? And oftentimes those conversations end by
0:02:57 saying, well, at least Amazon’s not delivering healthcare. And so that excuse has now been
0:03:01 officially taken off the table. And by the way, it’s worth noting that Amazon is not the first
0:03:06 employer to do this. I think it’s more Amazon’s position in the market as a key consumer-facing
0:03:11 brand. That’s really what has been the source of fear for many of these organizations.
0:03:14 Well, even something like AWS, Amazon Web Services, was something they built internally
0:03:19 for their own use that then became something they opened up to a ton of startups. And so
0:03:23 what it ended up enabling was this whole new wave of companies being built. So if they do open up
0:03:29 these services in the future, who knows what’s possible. Exactly. There are at least two vectors
0:03:33 that you could see this taking. One is Amazon actually turning this into a direct to consumer
0:03:38 service or taking more of that AWS approach and going B to B and saying, we’re now going to be
0:03:43 selling a benefit. One of the things that’s really interesting here is that they’re providing care,
0:03:48 but they’re doing that through contract so that they haven’t hired nurses and physicians.
0:03:52 Is a company called Oasis or something? A company called Oasis.
0:03:56 So what you’re also winning out then with the partnering side is that they essentially right
0:03:59 now are buying versus building or at least partnering versus building. And that’s really
0:04:03 interesting because Amazon at core is a tech company. So why wouldn’t they be building this
0:04:06 tech themselves? Do you have any thoughts on this whole bill versus buy aspect of their moves?
0:04:10 There’s a virtual care component, which certainly is technology enabled.
0:04:14 There is a home visit component, which is human clinical services. And then there’s
0:04:19 the pharmacy component, which is really what people believe to be pill pack sort of repackaged.
0:04:24 And I would say the first and the third of that certainly are tech and Amazon has built the first
0:04:28 and then acquired essentially the third. I think it’s really that middle piece why people were
0:04:32 skeptical that Amazon was going to get into healthcare is that the clinical service delivery
0:04:37 operations is really the most complex part of that, you know, having on the ground services to
0:04:42 enable nurses to walk into people’s homes and have the right equipment. So that piece intuitively
0:04:46 makes sense for this organization to actually sort of bring through a partnership.
0:04:50 But that is also, you know, something that people will be watching very closely is
0:04:55 will Amazon actually backwards integrate into those services ultimately themselves?
0:04:58 I think there’s also an assumption one can make here in that tech and bucket that you lay out
0:05:04 really that there is an incredible lift that one could get from technology in terms of helping
0:05:08 with the coordination of care, scheduling it and scaling it. Yeah, because I mean,
0:05:12 I think one of the things that is incredibly true about healthcare is we know it’s very analog
0:05:17 still. And so the things that get down on the board. Exactly. So I think, I mean, it’d be
0:05:23 interesting to see how and if Amazon is helping to essentially supercharge or power oasis in this
0:05:28 whole delivery. I have a question though, just to push back, which is this is all very tech-centric.
0:05:33 What would the counterpart be to sort of saying the realities of how healthcare really works?
0:05:37 Yeah, it’s a great point, Sonal. And I think some of the challenges that one would kind of see
0:05:42 around a business like this are, you know, the very reasons why sort of tech only companies
0:05:47 haven’t been able to scale historically. So certainly one is how do you sort of integrate
0:05:51 yourself into the supply chain of the broader healthcare landscape? Because at the end of
0:05:55 the day, the services that Amazon is providing now are primary care. They’re not doing anything
0:05:59 related to specialty care, certainly anything that’s related to sort of procedural surgical
0:06:03 services that would require you to go into a hospital, et cetera. And when you look at actually
0:06:08 the distribution of spend, primary care is really a small component of that. And so in
0:06:13 order to truly get at the even the cost equation, let alone the overall, how do you manage a patient’s
0:06:17 entire healthcare experience? This is really only scratching the surface.
0:06:22 So then honestly, is there room when you have huge players like this, like for startups? I mean,
0:06:26 at the end of the day, we always say that every small niche in healthcare is at least a billion
0:06:32 dollars wide. It’s such a massive market. Primary care alone is a $220 billion market opportunity.
0:06:35 And so I believe that it will not be a winner take on market, especially given some of the
0:06:39 characteristics of how you need to scale a business like this. And when we look at, you know,
0:06:43 these sort of novel primary care models, there’s a few questions that we will ask, you know,
0:06:48 one is, how does this service get distribution? That is oftentimes the hardest part of building
0:06:54 businesses in healthcare is you’re really fighting against very, very heavily ensconced
0:06:57 incumbents. I mean, to get around those channels or build new channels is very, very difficult.
0:07:02 I love, by the way, Alex Rumpel’s line, which is that the game for startups is to get distribution
0:07:07 before the incumbent gets innovation that nails that. Exactly. I mean, so that’s, you know,
0:07:10 sort of one thing to think about. The second thing is, you know, how does whatever upstart
0:07:14 company sort of integrate itself into the broader supply chain of healthcare? And that could be
0:07:18 through referral relationships, you know, how do you build a referral network and sort of
0:07:22 overcome some of the barriers to becoming essentially a new market entrant? And then
0:07:27 the third piece is scale on sort of a geographic basis. And healthcare is one of those sort of
0:07:32 businesses where just because you have a contract with a payer in a given sort of market or state,
0:07:37 that means nothing for reducing friction as you’re trying to enter into other geographies.
0:07:41 And so I think that step by step, that brute force model of how you sort of build
0:07:47 reach is challenging. Amazon, if they were to bundle this as an offering with something like
0:07:52 an Amazon Prime, you know, distribution becomes a no brainer. I think the downside for them will
0:07:57 arise from, you know, what about all of the data and how will my privacy be affected?
0:08:01 What is a future that it takes us to, we’ve been talking about the news so far, like, what’s the
0:08:06 big picture of what happens next in healthcare when there’s things like this new virtual care?
0:08:10 I think it pretends what the future of healthcare might look like. In a lot of ways, it’s becoming
0:08:15 much more of a decentralized thing. And so you can get healthcare in a retail setting,
0:08:18 whether it’s a minute clinic, you can get healthcare at home, whether it’s telepresence,
0:08:22 whether it’s home visits. I think what we’re going to see is, you know, in many ways healthcare,
0:08:28 you know, is leaving the building, healthcare is leaving the pill bottle. And many ways healthcare
0:08:32 is leaving the traditional idea of, you know, having a medicine back in that, you know,
0:08:39 now we have technology like iPhones that can do an increasing number of ways to detect health and
0:08:44 disease. You know, an Apple Watch can now act as an EKG. And so, you know, there’s so many things
0:08:47 that are coming together, I think we’re going to hopefully have a very positive impact on our
0:08:51 healthcare system. Healthcare is leaving the building, the bag and the bottle. So bottom line it for
0:08:55 me. Yeah, I think what Amazon is doing will be what, you know, large employers will start to do.
0:09:00 I also think that it is a sort of a forcing function for people to recognize that this
0:09:04 is now a thing, that this will be a category of how care is delivered, certainly at the lower
0:09:09 cutie ends of the spectrum, versus more specialty care and higher need. And startups have plenty
0:09:14 of market opportunity left across the service area of healthcare to innovate in similar ways
0:09:18 from the bottoms up. Well, thank you guys for joining this segment of 16 Minutes.
0:09:22 Okay, so for our next segment, I asked Asics and the General Partner, Chris Dixon, for his quick
0:09:27 take on Facebook’s annual developer event, Oculus Connect 6, which just took place this past week,
0:09:33 and what it means for VR virtual reality and AR augmented reality. And Dixon, as you go through
0:09:36 and just quickly summarize the news, quickly share the broad implication of each.
0:09:42 Yeah, so Oculus made a number of announcements. To me, the TLDR is they continue to advance
0:09:48 VR and AR at a very rapid rate. There’s the Oculus Quest, which is their marquee device right now.
0:09:52 It’s really kind of a game changer. And I think really has the potential to go mainstream. And
0:09:55 they actually said that the event that they are selling them as fast as they can make them,
0:10:00 they announced support for the Quest will now run PC VR games, which unlocks a whole bunch of
0:10:04 sort of new content. On the technical side, they’ve gotten full hand tracking working,
0:10:09 which means in the future won’t need to have the controllers in your hands. And also we’ll
0:10:13 have a much more granular ability to interact with the virtual world. I think of this in the
0:10:16 larger theme is what you’re going to see over time as you get rid of the controllers. And then
0:10:21 you see the headset shrinking and shrinking and eventually just simply be glasses that can do
0:10:26 both AR and VR functionality. And this is an important step along the way. They also announced
0:10:30 the Oculus Quest has some simple AR functionality where you can see through it’s called pass through
0:10:33 and they announced the pass through plus, which is kind of a more advanced version of that.
0:10:37 I think kind of signaling that they are thinking very much about kind of AR and VR converging
0:10:41 really they’re very similar technology where, you know, VR is when the real world is fully
0:10:46 occluded and AR is when you can see partly the virtual and the real world. Just a break
0:10:51 pass through down. So when you’re playing like VR game or just in a VR environment right now to
0:10:55 see the physical world, you actually have to take your headset off and then put it back on.
0:11:00 And so the significance of that is that when you talk about blending VR and AR, your point that you
0:11:04 actually can be immersed in the world and also have virtual world overlaid over the physical world.
0:11:08 Yeah. So one of the limits of VR now, like I’m a fan of VR, but like after an hour, there are some
0:11:13 things that are not optimal comfort wise. And so as you chip away at all those things, I think it
0:11:16 becomes a much more, first of all, much more social, like that’s one thing about VR. Like right now,
0:11:19 they have this cool thing where you can screencast and so people can see on their phone what you’re
0:11:24 seeing. And that makes it more social, but make it more inclusive, make it more open. So people
0:11:27 feel like they’re still in the room, but they’re having the full immersion. I mean, it’s, it’s,
0:11:31 there’s two sides of the coin. On the other hand, the whole benefit of VR is the deep immersion. So
0:11:33 you want that, but you also want, I think you want to balance. So that’s what they’re trying
0:11:37 to do with like the AR features and just the obvious things. They also announced some more
0:11:41 futuristic stuff. So for example, one thing that they’ve been working a lot on are what are called
0:11:44 verifocal lenses. Can you safely explain that? Yeah, just very briefly, it turns out there’s a
0:11:49 number of ways in which people see in 3D because, you know, you have two eyes and your brain puts
0:11:53 together the difference in what you see it. And VR is able to replicate that very well. If you want
0:11:57 to try it, it’s an app called Big Screen, which we’re investors in, where you can watch 3D movies
0:12:01 and you get a much more richer 3D effect than you do in the movie theater because you have true
0:12:05 eye separation. But it turns out there’s other ways in which your eyes see depth, not an expert
0:12:10 on this, but I’ll try. So what your eye expects is that when an object is farther away, the light
0:12:13 bends in a certain way. And right now in VR, it doesn’t happen that way, right? Because your
0:12:18 screen in front of you, it has an infinite focal distance is what the technologist would say.
0:12:22 And so one of the things they’ve now gotten working in the lab is something where you actually
0:12:27 can have a many dozens of layers of focal distance in the same headset. I would expect the next device
0:12:31 to have what’s called foveated rendering, which is basically fracture fovea, which is where your
0:12:36 eye is looking and render. So it turns out the way you look in real life is when you’re looking at
0:12:40 something, you see high res and the thing directly in front and then low res around it. And this is
0:12:44 your way of your brain kind of saving compute cycles. And so VR will do something similar where
0:12:49 you only render the center. Wait, so foveated rendering, if I understand correctly, it basically
0:12:55 trades off the broader field of view with higher resolution for where your eye is actually focusing
0:13:00 and not for focusing on things in the periphery as a way to trade off the available processing power.
0:13:05 Yeah. So for example, the Oculus Quest is running on a mobile processor, unlike the Oculus Rift,
0:13:09 which you have to physically plug into your PC and has much more GPU power. And so as a result,
0:13:15 if you look, you can see like less lighting effects, just simpler textures, things like that.
0:13:19 And that’s because the GPU is running at full speed. And it’s a mobile GPU. It’s amazing
0:13:22 that they could do this on a mobile GPU. The GPU is doing both inside out positional tracking,
0:13:27 which is itself a hard machine learning problem. And it’s rendering a full game engine and everything
0:13:31 else. And that’s just one of many things that are being advanced. And so a big question when you
0:13:36 have a new technologies, are you kind of following a linear or exponential path? And I think we’re
0:13:40 following an exponential path. We will be soon once we get the developer system really going.
0:13:48 The missing piece right now is enough users that developers can invest right now, the major kind
0:13:52 of game studios and other software developers don’t see it as a big enough platform. At some
0:13:56 point, we’ll hit that tipping point. There’s probably 10 million active users or something.
0:14:01 It needs to be in the billions and tens of billions. But all signs point to this technology
0:14:05 really getting rapidly better and Facebook driving the vast majority of it. There are other
0:14:09 companies doing cool stuff like Valve is doing some very cool stuff. Microsoft tested the HoloLens
0:14:12 and AR and things. I think they’re kind of betting more on enterprise use cases and AR.
0:14:16 Okay. So that’s a quick update at the device level and where we are, where we’re not in the trend.
0:14:21 Bottom line, for me, Dixon. The bottom line is this is going to be a major new platform,
0:14:24 I believe, and we’re seeing evidence of it. I think we went through the Trophotus
0:14:28 Illusion in VR and we’re coming out of it. And the rate of improvement is very quick.
0:14:34 I get the feeling watching Oculus Connect the way I used to watching the Steve Jobs Apple
0:14:38 Keynotes like today. It feels more incremental, frankly, on the mobile phone side. But here,
0:14:42 there’s like sort of genuine big breakthroughs. Fantastic. Well, thank you for joining this week’s
0:14:46 episode of 16 minutes. Thank you. So in this last segment, we’re going to talk about the
0:14:50 recent news. And honestly, I wouldn’t normally put this in the news because it’s really journal
0:14:54 article, but enough media headlines covered it that I want us to talk about it, which is this
0:15:01 paper apparently Google claims quantum supremacy. But here’s the funny part. The paper was accidentally
0:15:05 released by some of their collaborators at NASA who put it on their public website. So then it was
0:15:10 really quickly taken down. But in that period, a ton of media headlines hit about it. And just
0:15:15 to quickly summarize the news, so a group at Google achieved so-called quantum supremacy with a 53
0:15:21 qubit superconducting device. And a qubit just for definition is a quantum bit. And they’re doing
0:15:26 this with a quantum processor called Sycamore. And just a quick definition on what generally
0:15:30 people may define as quantum supremacy is just very simply put, it’s a point at which a quantum
0:15:35 computer surpasses classical computers for some specifics that are problems in a given domain.
0:15:38 And then there’s also some other recent news and movements. But what we really want to talk
0:15:43 about today is tease apart the facts from the fiction. Scott Aaronson, the professor at UT
0:15:46 Austin, who writes a lot about quantum computing, a blog post he wrote about the Google News. He had
0:15:51 this line that said, “Fact-free pontificating about what it means has predictably proliferated.”
0:15:56 So we’re here to unproliferate that. That voice you just heard is ASICS and Z-Bio General Partner
0:16:02 Vijay Pande, who has a PhD in physics, which is very relevant here, but also early in his lab at
0:16:07 Stanford did pioneering work on a distributed computing protein folding project called Folding
0:16:11 at Home. And it’s pioneering because it really pushed the boundaries of computing and was very
0:16:16 early to using GPUs. And by the way, just to quickly define what quantum computing is,
0:16:22 simply put, it’s a type of computing based on nature’s operating system of quantum mechanics.
0:16:28 So unlike classical computers, which are limited to human style binary code, quantum computers can
0:16:32 do things that classical computers can’t do or can’t do fast enough. And this is really important,
0:16:37 especially as Moore’s Law continues to achieve in seemingly impossible feats. At some point,
0:16:40 it really hits its limits. And that’s where quantum computers come in. But people have been
0:16:45 talking about them for ages, and they also always tend to go right to the saying, “Oh no,
0:16:49 once this happens, all our cryptography will break too.” So what’s your quick take there, Vijay?
0:16:52 So what’s interesting here is that there are some people who think that this is nothing,
0:16:56 and that’s wrong actually. And then some people think this is in the world, and that’s wrong too.
0:17:02 So is quantum computing real? Is it here? Yes. Now, does this mean that cryptography is broken?
0:17:07 Does this mean that classical computers aren’t useful? That part is not true. And I think
0:17:12 supremacy is a term that really maybe is a little bit grander than it needs to be.
0:17:15 Yeah. Actually, can we talk about this? Because people get really caught up in it. And I think
0:17:19 it’s one of the funniest jokes I’ve heard about the term quantum supremacy. Someone once told me
0:17:23 that it’s a way for Google to convince management that they’re doing good work. Because it gives
0:17:27 like the managers like, “How do you even do milestones and really cutting edge work like
0:17:31 quantum computing?” But the other thing that is, you’ve actually coined this concept of a quantum
0:17:35 intercept when we wrote about our investment in reggae computing. And I’ve also heard the term
0:17:40 quantum in imitability. And also like reguettis use the term quantum advantage. I think quantum
0:17:47 supremacy is a big way to say that you can run a calculation on a quantum computer faster than
0:17:51 whatever that calculation would be on a classical machine. It doesn’t have to be
0:17:56 a calculation that any of us would ever want to run or need to run. It can do it better basically.
0:17:59 And just to be clear, this can be very different for very different types of problems in different
0:18:03 domains. That number of qubits required to do it is very different across all of them.
0:18:08 Absolutely. You told me about the part that isn’t type. Can you tell me the part that doesn’t work
0:18:12 about this? Okay, so here’s what you can do. It definitely isn’t a general purpose machine. You
0:18:16 couldn’t run any sort of calculation on it. But you know, GPUs are like that too, in a sense. And
0:18:20 then the second thing that it isn’t is that people have been saying, “Oh, now cryptography is broken
0:18:28 and Google can do this and that.” That is not the case. When people talk about a quantum computer,
0:18:32 they mean different things. And this is part of the problem. And so when some people talk about
0:18:38 quantum computers, they mean error correcting or noiseless quantum computers. And what Google
0:18:43 and IBM and Raghetti are working on is sort of near intermediate sort of noisy quantum computers.
0:18:46 Are you talking about NISC, like noisy intermediate scale quantum?
0:18:47 Yes.
0:18:52 And in layman’s terms, is it basically the idea like how to basically get useful information
0:18:53 out of a crazy quantum machine?
0:18:56 It has a little bit of noise, but there’s a lot of things you can do to work around that.
0:19:01 And so in that sense, it’s maybe almost a little bit more similar to analog computing in the early
0:19:05 days where noise doesn’t have to be a problem, but you have to have clever algorithms.
0:19:08 And there’s several clever algorithms that run on these NISC-style machines,
0:19:10 but cryptography is not one of them.
0:19:14 And so here’s why this is interesting. You talked about the early folding home days.
0:19:19 When we first coded on GPUs before CUDA or languages for GPUs were common, we were one
0:19:24 quarter the speed of a CPU. And a lot of people in my lab were kind of disappointed about this.
0:19:29 I was excited because what happens is that when you have two curves and one is going faster than
0:19:33 the other with the GPU curve going faster in the CPU curve, just the fact that you could
0:19:37 get this to work means that in a relatively short period of time it will become dominant.
0:19:41 It’s interesting you mentioned from CPU to GPU because people have talked about also
0:19:46 TPUs like tensor processor unit, but then after that a QPU, a quantum processing unit.
0:19:48 Well, the QPU and a quantum computer are one of the same.
0:19:52 So quantum computers are a very different approach to computing in that instead of doing
0:19:57 calculations with a typical processor, you’re essentially running a quantum experiment
0:19:58 with these multiple qubits.
0:19:59 And why would you bother?
0:20:03 So just concretely, what are the early applications where this might play out?
0:20:07 Yeah, the early applications that people are thinking about are one in areas of actually
0:20:12 doing quantum mechanics calculations, but also there’s a whole burgeoning area of
0:20:18 quantum machine learning. Basically, the non-linearity of quantum mechanics allows a much simpler
0:20:22 version of quantum machine learning to reproduce what you normally have to do in a much more
0:20:25 complex way with classical machine learning. And of course, you know, in the world I care
0:20:28 about engineering biology, now we can finally engineer it in some aspects that we can’t
0:20:32 today. So quantum mechanics is the world of molecules as it is. And so being able to finally
0:20:37 calculate that is entering to a world where we can apply engineering like principles
0:20:39 into areas that we just can’t right now.
0:20:42 So then let’s go back to this idea of quantum supremacy. So give me your quick take on, do
0:20:45 you think it’s just BS and some hypey thing or is it like a real thing?
0:20:50 I think it’s real that they’ve been actually able to run a bonafide algorithm on a machine
0:20:54 of that scale. So I think that’s impressive. And I think what this hopefully does is take
0:20:58 people who are quantum skeptics and make them realize that there actually is something here.
0:21:02 The other part that I think is really, really important to emphasize is that
0:21:07 it’s not like we’re jumping from one Moore’s law curve to another that’s going a little faster.
0:21:11 If Moore’s law says the power of the machine doubles like roughly every year, the quantum
0:21:16 machine, its power is exponential in the number of qubits for certain types of applications.
0:21:21 And so we’re GPUs, we just had a faster version of Moore’s law from CPU to QPU is the paradigm
0:21:25 shift. It’s a completely different game. This is something like it’s a completely different law.
0:21:29 Well, to break down concretely with the implication for people building software and anything that’s
0:21:35 relying on computing, it means that if that law plays out, the surprise of when people hit that
0:21:40 moment of quantum supremacy, intercept, advantage, whatever label we put it will happen much faster
0:21:43 when you think nothing happens all of a sudden. Oh my God, it’s there.
0:21:48 That’s exactly right. You know, people are making analogies for this to Sputnik. You know, Sputnik
0:21:53 was just a very simple satellite, but there was a lot more to come. Scott Aronson actually
0:21:57 likens it to the Wright brothers and it’s the perfect example. This is exactly what you said.
0:22:00 It’s not here, but it’s also not not here because the Wright brothers, there was all these false
0:22:04 starts, but then they actually did learn how to fly. You and I just talked about this a couple
0:22:08 of weeks ago on 16 minutes. There’s always a hybrid phase when you’re doing really cutting edge stuff.
0:22:11 Absolutely. So we talked about these different types of machines. There’s like the noiseless
0:22:15 machine. There’s the NISC machine. You could actually think about a third type of architecture
0:22:20 where you combine some aspects of quantum and classical. Anyway, when you run on a GPU, you
0:22:24 never run just on the GPU. It’s a GPU and the CPU working together. Exactly.
0:22:29 And some parts are there on the CPU, some parts on the GPU. So a CPU-QPU hybrid makes a ton of
0:22:33 sense, especially now. Fantastic. Thank you for joining the segment. Great. Thank you.
Our news podcast, 16 Minutes — where we quickly cover the top headlines of the week, the a16z way (why are these topics in the news; what’s real, what’s hype from our vantage point of tech trends) — is now only available as its own show feed, separately from the main a16z Podcast… so be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts if you want our weekly news & tech take!
This is the tenth episode of the show, and this week we cover a variety of topics with the following a16z experts:
- Amazon Care healthcare news this week that they’re now providing a virtual medical clinic for employees, initially in Seattle, using telemedicine and in-home visits; what does their delivering healthcare actually mean for both incumbents and startups… and the future of medicine? — with Julie Yoo and Jorge Conde
- Oculus Connect 6, Facebook’s annual developer event, where there were a number of announcements about devices, content, and more that could be key to the evolution of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) — with Chris Dixon
- Google quantum supremacy claim, as shared in a paper with/via NASA; what’s fact, what’s fiction about it; what does it actually mean (or not mean) for cryptography and other applications; and where are we, really, in quantum computing? — with Vijay Pande
…hosted by Sonal Chokshi.
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