AI at Work in 2025: Quantum
You should now have the message that the time to learn Copilot was yesterday. What is coming next in AI for 2025?
Making predictions about technology is best left to professionals, who strangely enough always get them wrong. As we found last week, it is usually the science fiction imaginators who get closer to the truth. If Special Agent Fox Mulder knows anything it is this: the truth is out there.
Mulder’s fascination with alien life, UFOs, time travel and all manner of supernatural beings began when his sister was abducted by aliens. He devoted his life to unravelling what happened to her. Along the way, and fortunately for us, he encountered robots and other forms of entirely artificial intelligence. Even more fortunately, it was his entirely unsought-after and unwanted partnership with medical doctor Dana Scully that put rocket boosters on his work.
When we started this newsletter a month or so back we knew we had to put practical tips and ideas into it. Having spent two weeks looking at Copilot, it might surprise you to know that there isn’t much more we need to tell you. We can finesse things and go a little deeper, but Copilot is designed to be easy to use. You don’t need a brain the size of a planet… [Mulder, this is last week’s shtick. Scully.]
So this week we round up some of the more interesting developments and try in vain to predict the future.
There are all the usual updates on funding rounds and new model versions. However the busy senior manager already has her hands full without trying to keep up with each minor version step forwards in some LLM she barely even has time to play with. So instead we are looking a little further ahead at developments in Quantum over at Microsoft, a company badly in need of a new idea.
The only problem with Quantum and Q-Day is that nobody knows when it will arrive. It might be only a slight exaggeration to say it will land with the force of the first nuclear bomb but the implications are stark. Every encryption system in the world cracked overnight. It will make Y2K look like a jelly and ice cream party for a clowder of cats. [Mulder, you need to focus here. Scully.] It is imperative that the ‘wrong’ people do not develop one first. Several others mention Oppenheimer in relation to Quantum performance.
But what on earth is it? Mulder tries his best but we think you will prefer Scully’s take on it later on.
Quantum uses properties of physics at the quantum or particular level. Using typically either electrons or photons, such a device has almost unimaginable potential. Housed in a data centre within precise temperature and other atmospheric conditions, it needs another ‘normal’ supercomputer just to manage the chaos it contains. If the conditions are not absolutely perfect, the reaction will not happen and the computer will not work.
Some such particles have very strange properties, ones which keep even Brian Cox awake at night. A photon can be in more than one place at the same time which helps to explain its performance. Binary goes out of the flying saucer window and we get new ways to represent data and code that might be analogous to today’s parallel processors but these new devices will be almost infinitely parallel.
So we no longer have bits (short for binary digit) but qubits, or Quantum bits. If you are starting to feel a little Queasy already, it is imperative you do not read the original Nature article that all of the recent kerfuffle relates to.
No doubt at this point Scully will interject with some misguided rubbish about cold nuclear fusion and say none of this Quantum stuff will ever happen anyway.
As Mulder grabs his flashlight and raincoat to chase another shadow, Scully ends this week’s show with her own sceptical and obtuse insights.
Scully Explains
Googles “Special Agent Fox Mulder” – because, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last time, I’ve never seen The X-Files either, so had no idea who Mulder and Scully are.
Once you’ve done the same, let’s dive into Mulder’s latest predictions about the future of technology.
He is absolutely right about one thing: the future is hard to predict. Whether it’s about technology, the economy, or even the weather, no one really knows what’s coming. If someone ever does invent something that can see into the future, they’ll probably become insanely rich… and also cause a lot of chaos. But since that’s (probably) never going to happen—yes, that’s my prediction—everyone’s just making their best guesses, and even the so-called experts get it wrong sometimes.
However, Mulder is smart so he is predicting what you should familiarize yourself with next.
Our last two articles started discussing Large Language Models (LLMs), and we will go back to that in more detail in a future newsletter (me predicting the future there). However he thinks the next thing you should familiarise yourself with is Quantum Computing. Apparently, it’s “the next big thing” according to people who seem to know about this stuff. But what does that actually mean?
Honestly, I didn’t have a clue either—so I did some research (I asked Mulder/ChatGPT). Here’s the simplest explanation I can give.
Normal computers, like the one you’re using right now, think in bits. These are like tiny switches that are either off (0) or on (1). Everything your computer does—from playing videos to sending emails—is just lots of these switches turning on and off really fast.
Quantum computers are different. They use something called qubits (A Quantum Bit). A qubit can be a 0, a 1, or both at the same time. A bit like flipping a coin and having it land on both heads and tails at once.
Because qubits can do this weird trick, quantum computers can try out lots of possibilities all at once. This means they could solve problems much faster than regular computers (or Humans) — like cracking super hard codes or simulating complex chemical reactions.
That’s it, in a nutshell. Just think of quantum computers as super powerful calculators that can think in more than one direction at once. What does that mean for us? Who knows? But according to Mulder, it’s worth paying attention to.
As always, he’s the one with the brain the size of a planet three out from the sun. I’m just here to explain it. He would be nothing without me, honestly. [She forgot who started this show. And you forgot about cold fusion. Mulder.]