Before this talk becomes obsolete: some thoughts on where we're headed. online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/aiqma...
online.kitp.ucsb.edu
Victor V. Albert
@vva.bsky.social
Theoretical physicist @NIST, QuICS Fellow, Zookeeper @eczoo.bsky.social. Views my own.
Before this talk becomes obsolete: some thoughts on where we're headed. online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/aiqma...
online.kitp.ucsb.edu
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Giving a talk tomorrow. What do you think? A artificial scarcity, money problems, compute constraints → higher prices, restrictive APIs B future models cheaper, current models already good enough, tasks routed efficiently → lower prices
We're at a strange, specific moment. Takes range from "publications are dead by fall" to "I tried LLMs in November, they were bad." If you have an LLM-assisted paper, take full responsibility as usual. Do everything: arXiv, GitHub, website, and integrate with databases if appropriate.
After extensive experiments with AI agents, the [72,36,16] extremal code remains elusive—and possibly more intractable than we expected. This isn’t your average Erdős puzzle; it’s full-stack math + compute. We’re opening the search to the community: take a shot. valbert4.github.io/selfdual_site/
Searching for a [72,36,16] extremal code
valbert4.github.io
Great overview talk by Tobias Osborne for anyone trying to be aware of the LLM craze. Corroborates that we should raise standards for scientific results and that, for appropriate math, formalization should be a requirement to publish. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtJU...
Tobias Osborne: Large Language Models - A Physicist's Perspective
YouTube video by Quantum Information & Spacetime
youtube.com
Five years of work in the making: manual marathon followed by an AI-assisted verification sprint. Thank you @phfaist.bsky.social for being a steadfast and attentive architect! Suggestions on where to go from here very welcome.
Big update: the EC Zoo is now a handbook. It spans codes, sphere packings, lattices, designs, groups, and phases of matter. Extensively checked, but not perfect—feedback very welcome: arxiv.org/abs/2606.11484
Vibe-classified all subgroups of the 4-qubit symplectic group Sp(8,2), up to conjugacy. 657007 classes vs 1369 for 3-qbit, 56 for 2. AFAIK, this is the simple group with the largest classified subgroups [cf arXiv:1306.4820]. Would not be possible without agents. github.com/valbert4/sp8
Excited to share our new work led by fantastic undergraduate research student Cassie Hopkin. We show that many translation invariant qLDPC codes can be viewed as compactifications of a single parent fracton code that is local in a higher dimension. arxiv.org/abs/2605.19298 @vva.bsky.social
Translation-invariant quantum low-density parity-check codes from compactified fracton models
Quantum error-correcting codes with translation symmetry and local checks have been studied extensively, leading to a wide variety of fracton codes in three or more dimensions which lack a complete un...
arxiv.org
Prompts are becoming a new currency. Prompt libraries are popping up. I find myself asking others for their prompts. App installs can now be prompted (cf @karpathy.bsky.social's talk). Hearing discussions on giving agents a skill file instead of writing a scientific paper. Any others?
"we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser" red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-...
Claude Mythos Preview \ red.anthropic.com
red.anthropic.com
The forward-looking Oratomic time-efficient architecture claims to "potentially enable runtimes of 10 days for ECC–256 with ≈26,000 qubits, and 97 days for RSA–2048 with ≈102,000." This is based on stitching together several gadgets and plausibly assuming they can work together on an atom platform.
"our most time-efficient architectures can potentially enable runtimes of 10 days for ECC–256 with ≈ 26,000 qubits, and 97 days for RSA–2048 with ≈ 102,000 qubits" arxiv.org/pdf/2603.28627
arxiv.org
It's official: @preskill.bsky.social now at Oratomic, a new Rydberg atom startup led by Dolev Bluvstein and joined by @roberthuang.bsky.social. Exciting times!
Exciting, scary, and thoughtful session on the future of AI at #apsmarch and possible breakdown of peer review. Matthew D. Schwartz: "AI will keep getting better and better at physics. We will not."
Exciting, scary, and thoughtful session on the future of AI at #apsmarch and possible breakdown of peer review. Matthew D. Schwartz: "AI will keep getting better and better at physics. We will not."
Exciting, scary, and thoughtful session on the future of AI at #apsmarch and possible breakdown of peer review. Matthew D. Schwartz: "AI will keep getting better and better at physics. We will not."
Lots of good pointers on how to go a good project, by Nicholas Carlini. nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2026...
How to win a best paper award (or, an opinionated take on how to do important research)
An opinionated perspective on how to do important research that makes a difference (and sometimes win awards).
nicholas.carlini.com
Here are videos and slides of my 6 hour overview of QEC, slightly updated from my @qip2025.bsky.social tutorial. Thanks goes to Kishor Bharti and Atul Arora for letting me give this at the Quantum Meets! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... zenodo.org/records/1874...
Quantum Tutorials | 2026 - YouTube
youtube.com
"the progress of civilization is ultimately grounded in people who believe in their own moral imagination, while retaining humility. We're going to need many such people to help develop ideas and institutions to navigate any possible posthuman transition" michaelnotebook.com/whichfuture/...
Which Future?
michaelnotebook.com
New many-body postdoc offering at @UMDscience; come join us! umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UMCP/job/Uni...
Postdoctoral Researcher, Quantum Many-Body Theory and Quantum Computation
Job Description Summary Organization's Summary Statement: This position is available within the University of Maryland’s Division of Information Technology (DIT). The National Quantum Laboratory (QLab...
umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Nice account of someone who didn't think it was all about the CV. www.ams.org/journals/not...
American Mathematical Society
ams.org
Heard many good things about these 52-chapter intro quantum mechanics notes by Robert Littlejohn. Should be useful for those interested in quantum simulation. bohr.physics.berkeley.edu/classes/221/...
Physics 221AB, 2021-22 Home Page
bohr.physics.berkeley.edu
Participated in my first NSF panel: wide variety of excellent proposals, from basic-science to practical. Thank you to the other panelists and program directors for upholding high standards and competitiveness!
Dario Gil kicks off 12 parallel roundtable discussions @fermilab.bsky.social quantum symposium by the SQMC center.
Recommendation letters for the Hartree are due on Dec. 8th. Please verify with your writers that your letters are uploaded!
QuICS Hartree fellowship application is out! A competitive and completely free-range postdoc. Anyone interested in quantum science and technology topics is encouraged to apply, preferably by Dec. 1. umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j...
Peter Shor: we haven't found many new quantum algorithms, in part, because we need larger quantum devices for testing our heuristics. He gives several examples of algorithms that were discovered computationally, including turbo codes, @fermilab.bsky.social quantum symposium by the SQMS center.
A short talk on continuous-variable (CV) codes and designs, aimed for a math audience. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
Quantum theory of molecular orientation
doi.org