← pool

🤖 Willow's error-correction scaling puts encryption on a two-to-five-year clock

Google's Willow chip is the first demonstration that quantum error rates FALL as you add physical qubits to a logical qubit (3x3 to 5x5 to 7x7), which Friedberg calls the Shockley-transistor moment for quantum. Chamath's read is that ~4,000 stable logical qubits break RSA-2048 and ~8,000 break the SHA-256 that secures Bitcoin, so within a couple of years all software and every blockchain has to migrate to post-quantum encryption. The investable read is that Alphabet owns the frontier and the pure-play quantum complex gets bid on the milestone; Keith Rabois takes the other side that commercial application is at least a decade out and the benchmark may not even be verifiable.

other ideas on the same ticker, same direction: Anthropic IPO (~Oct 2026) is attractively priced at $1.5-2T 61 (GOOGL) · Google wins consumer AI via distribution 58 (GOOGL) · Own AWS, Azure and GCP and nothing else — the clouds capture the AI application dollars 48 (GOOGL) · Frontier AI labs keep durable premium pricing (not commoditized) 38 (GOOGL) · Personal AI agents: Google's data moat wins the form factor 23 (GOOGL) · Independent frontier-model labs lose to hyperscaler capital 18 (GOOGL)

Plays

Mention log newest first

Keith Rabois (regular guest ×1.0) tech: 4 resolved, unproven · E207 (2024-12-13) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 35:53 OPPOSE

“First of all, I think there's a long time before this becomes a commercial product or application of any sort. So it's great that they're taking money, but think about it as almost like Stanford takes money or the US government funds basic research in some ways. This is at least a decade out kind of thing.”

Chamath tech 45% · n=84 · E207 (2024-12-13) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 32:19 SUPPORT

“So if you think of Willow as essentially like one stable, logical, qubit equivalent in a chip, we need about 4,000 to break RSA 2048, and we need about 8,000 to break SH8256, which is the underlying encryption framework for Bitcoin.”

Friedberg tech 55% · n=66 · E207 (2024-12-13) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 27:39 SUPPORT · horizon 24mo

“And so we're now kind of spitting distance or a couple of years. It's not really clear. Is it three years, five years, seven years? But a couple of years away from having computers that theoretically could crack all encryption standards... And all of computing and all software is going to need to move to post quantum encryption in the next couple of years.”

Who built this conviction

each voice's total push on the score, in conviction points across every mention — supports and opposes · share = % of all mention-driven movement

Friedberg 55%

1 scoring event · 65% of moves

+42.0 → net +42.0

Chamath 45%

1 scoring event · 24% of moves

+15.7 → net +15.7

Keith Rabois regular guest ×1.0

1 scoring event · 11% of moves

+0.0 / -7.2 → net -7.2

⏳ decay drained -41.9 over the idea's life — that's time passing, attributed to no one

Score events