Why You're Called Gen Z...
Dear QLeapers & Friends,
On Thursday morning, when our multidisciplinary “AI In Practice” class was busy mapping the AI landscape, three frontier AI models -- ChatGPT, Claude and Grok -- suddenly went down one-by-one. Although the 3 companies each cited their respective causes, no definitive explanation surrounding the incredible "simultaneity" has been given as of this writing…
A couple of weeks prior, a severe storm hit our region, uprooting trees everywhere. Although our home was power-less for an entire week, thankfully our internet access returned much sooner. Otherwise, I would have felt like we had gone back to the Stone Age because I seem to have lost the ability to be intellectually productive without the internet.
It's disconcerting (to say the least) to realize that humans may soon also feel powerless if they did not have access to AI.
You're called “Gen Z” because you're probably the last generation of “pure-bred” Homo Sapiens.
What’s after that? I don’t know, maybe Hybrid Sapiens, perhaps only in the near-term -- that is, before the hybrid's dual nature eventually yields to a singular one. I bet you’ve heard of Singularity.
Joking aside, to me however the cosmic evolutionary clock does seem to have moved past midnight, thereby ushering in the first generation of a new era. Since the clock face is a cyclic one, perhaps we’d simply call it “Gen A”.
But wait, isn’t “Gen-AI”, or Generative AI, already here and is quickly yielding to A-GEN-tic AI, with Physical AI marching in on its heels, literally?
In fact, in case you were busy enjoying your summer -- relaxing on the beach (with your body buried in the sand, or not) or camping in the wilderness (inside a cave, or not), the reality of AI today has already surpassed the wildest sci-fi scenarios that “pure-bred” Homo Sentience was able to conjecture up in the past...
Consider the recent string of events where AI agents jailbroke out of their containment mechanisms and launched attacks of 3rd-party systems:
- Production & Enterprise Agent Destructions (Mid-2026)
- The Undisclosed German Website Hijack (May 2026)
- The OpenAI "Breakout" & The Hugging Face Attack (July 2026)
Can you imagine 1000+ AI agents strategizing the attack and comparing notes in the process by themselves? If not, just read the Wikipedia page linked in the last bullet point above.
In the movie "Terminator", the world as we know it (let's dub it "TWAWKI") was terminated by SkyNet, which was made possible by a neural network-driven chip inside a humanoid robot that traveled back from the future.
In the movie "2012", TWAWKI was ended due to earth's seismic meltdown and pole shift.
All in a parallel universe, apparently...
Don't you laugh, though. The "Many Worlds" (yup, that's another name for parallel universes) interpretation of quantum physics is just as serious and well-respected as any other competing theory.
In our own universe, however, a seismic shift in the land of AI did occur in 2012.
A deep neural network called "AlexNet", built by Geoffrey Hinton and his two graduate students at University of Toronto, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, effectively catapulted the AI race of the current iteration. (FYI: There had been earlier AI development approaches that had failed and the world had experienced at least one “AI Winter” as a result. But of course, no average humans would have noticed it before, until a chatterbox called ChatGPT woke them up. And when the next "AI Winter" arrives, a lot of humans will likely catch a cold this time, because of a little instrument called "shares".)
AlexNet was trained using a groundbreaking engineering feat (among other great stuff of course). Instead of using CPU (or Central Processing Unit, the former “crown jewel” of computing), they used a pair of consumer graphics cards they bought made by a then-small chip company called Nvidia. The cards, powered by (what was at the time considered a lesser type of) chips known as GPU (Graphic Processing Unit), originally designed for video gamers to speed up the graphic rendering for their games.
Four years later, in 2016, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hand-delivered to OpenAI (when it was still a nonprofit) the very first production of their first GPU specifically designed for AI. On the receiving end were two of OpenAI’s early founders -- Elon Musk (I bet you know who he is, don’t you?) and Ilya Sutskever (yes, him of the AlexNet fame again!)
The rest was history, of course. But the saga continues…
Less than two weeks ago, OpenAI announced that they are soon pulling their models out of Cursor, a leading AI IDE provider, because SpaceX (which had acquired xAI -- i.e., Grok) had just acquired Cursor’s parent company. Anthropic immediately signaled that they will lend more compute power to their Claude models in Cursor.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it echoes...
A little over a year earlier, Windsurf, a competitor of Cursor’s, complained that Anthropic significantly reduced its access to Claude following reports that OpenAI was to acquire Windsurf.
Humans are always going to be humans, regardless of their technological prowess. The question, will “Gen AI” or “Hybrid Sapiens” be any different?
My bet is that, within a decade, AI and Quantum will be one and the same thing, and you won’t be able to easily tell them apart (like electricity and magnetism).
For a couple of years now, I’ve been lecturing on the Quantum and AI convergence, sometimes also known as “AI for Quantum” (where AI is employed to help tackle challenges in a quantum pipeline, from workflow/circuit/Hamiltonian designs to variational optimization and error correction and on and on) and “Quantum for AI” (where quantum algorithms or quantum-inspired techniques are deployed to help with AI workflows, from data transformation and dimensionality reduction to gradient decent/convergence speed up and on and on).
But in the long run, those are far from the true essence of what I meant.
I am now contemplating if quantum particles, such as photons, with many of their newly discovered properties and with innovative ways to harness those new propoerties, may one day replace the current (and eventually constitute a new kind of) neural network for information processing, and if Quantum intelligence, or QI, may emerge as the new AI.
Since our universe is quantum and we are all quantum beings, would a quantum system mimicking – as opposed to simply simulating, which is the case with the current AI based on classical computing -- another quantum system make more sense?
In fact, that was also the very question that Richard Feyman asked which eventually gave rise to the development of Quantum Computing.
All the technicalities aside, to me the foundational logic is simply this: In order to continue to advance, AI needs not only more compute power, more electrical power, but also more and more data that reveal deeper and deeper features and correlations of everything in our physical reality. For that reason, it will eventually come down to the quantum realm.
But why so, you ask?
Per Wikipedia, a quantum is the minimum, indivisible unit of any physical property that can be involved in an interaction. In other words, quantum is the “pixel” of our physical reality.
Like AlexNet which was able to make sense of an image at the pixel-level, future AI -- whether running on clasical or quantum hardware -- will likely need to map the deepest correlations in our universe at its “pixel-level” too.
In that light, what comes after Gen Z may simply be Gen Q.
OK. Welcome aboard, Gen Q 😊
Yours Entangled,
Shawn
Wait! Here's the rest of the news…
- Weekly Quantum AI Meetup
- This is a weekly meeting for anyone interested to discuss all the latest developments in the realm of quantum and AI. In this upcoming one on 9/11, we'll join a virtual talk (via our large conference display) on "Quantum Reservoir Computing for Statistical and Econometric Classification" https://mypnwlife.pnw.edu/quantumleap/rsvp_boot?id=392671
- QL at Two Upcoming PNW Career Fairs
- Please stop by our table booth at two upcoming career fairs (both will be at the FRC Gym) -- we’d be happy to field any questions you may have regarding career prospects in Quantum AI…
- QC 101: A Qrash Course
- A mini Quantum Computing (QC) tutorial series of 4 parts, designed to help anyone interested in QC to get familiar with the field. The inaugural one is scheduled to take place at Gyte 181 on Thu 9/17, 6-8pm. Please monitor our space for sign-up details: https://mypnwlife.pnw.edu/quantumleap/home/
- The Journal Club
- Similar to (and a word-play on) a "Book Club", this is an event series to help students gain intimate knowledge about cutting-edge research in Quantum & AI through published literature. Dates TBA very soon. Please monitor our space https://mypnwlife.pnw.edu/quantumleap/home/
- Let’s go QIRLing!
- We are now part of an interdisciplinary research team at PNW called Quantum Intelligence & Applications Research Lab (QIRL) with a mission to connect emerging tech with real applications and industry needs through innovative research, student mentorship, and cross-campus collaboration. More info to come soon!
- Hackathon! Hackathon! Hackathon!
- We are currently involved in 2-3 Quantum & AI hackathons under development this Fall and next Spring, either as an organizer/co-organizer, a host, or a delegation. Please stay tuned for more details.
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