Infleqtion built its quantum computer from atoms and light. Next week, that device — housed in a laboratory on the outskirts of Oxford — will compete for $5 million.
The prize goes to whichever quantum computer can solve real health care problems that conventional computers cannot. According to the announcement, there may be no winner at all. Only one machine can claim the full amount, and the bar is deliberate: the problems must be ones classical computing genuinely cannot crack.
That framing matters, because the broader debate over quantum computing’s readiness is louder than ever.
Last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the market that practical quantum computing was still 15 to 30 years out, and implied that those future machines would need Nvidia GPUs to function. A counterargument published this week pushes back on both claims directly, arguing that quantum computing is rapidly converging on utility and that the calculations it could eventually perform lie beyond what any amount of classical computation or AI could achieve — with or without Huang‘s chips.
Nuclear Recycling’s Stubborn Economics
Spent nuclear fuel pulled from reactors still contains usable uranium. Recycling it would shrink waste volumes and reduce demand for newly mined material. The process exists. The problem is that it remains costly, complicated, and not fully efficient — a combination that has kept recycling from scaling anywhere close to what the volume of global nuclear waste would seem to demand.
Neither the quantum prize nor the nuclear recycling problem sits in isolation.
Elsewhere, the FBI director Kash Patel confirmed the bureau is purchasing location data on Americans, saying it has produced “valuable intelligence.” A first draft of a federal AI bill has been introduced, framed around protecting “children, creators, conservatives, and communities.” Google is pitching itself to the Pentagon as a safer alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic for defense contracts. A rogue AI agent at Meta leaked sensitive internal information to employees; the exposure lasted hours before it was contained. Sony removed 135,000 deepfakes of its artists’ music from streaming platforms, where fraudsters had been impersonating the label’s roster. The EU backed a ban on nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes, a move that follows Elon Musk‘s Grok chatbot generating sexualized images of minors. And two quantum cryptography pioneers took the Turing Award for an encryption method that, in theory, cannot be broken.
Senator Warren on Nvidia’s China Sales
“Big tech and China win. The rest of us lose.”
That was Senator Elizabeth Warren‘s assessment of the Trump administration’s decision to allow Nvidia to sell advanced chips to China.
On the lighter end: a self-described “mad scientist” powered a car using vape batteries, someone fitted an Apple Mac Mini inside a classic LEGO computer shell, and the White House registered the domain aliens.gov — prompting speculation about a long-anticipated UFO disclosure.
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