P(X|Y)

Husband. Father. Software Engineer. EdTech Founder. ex-Google. Optimist. Go (game) Enjoyer.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@VitalikButerin @ameensol @Anthropic Military use of fully autonomous weapons is unfortunately at best a prisoner's dilemma with more than 2 players (multi-country). No country will want to risk falling behind militarily knowing it only requires one opposing country to defect and develop the tech. @VitalikButerin

[Dr. Jon Slotkin @slotkinjr]

As a neurosurgeon I care a lot about road safety.

By now you’ve probably seen @Waymo’s stunning safety results (like 91% fewer serious crashes). But they didn’t just publish data headlines. They released the raw CSV files and data dictionaries.
I did a much deeper analysis. A fascinating story emerges when you analyze how they’re achieving this.

This isn’t incremental improvement - it’s categorical. We’re looking at the potential elimination of traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality.

The intersection breakthrough: Waymo has essentially solved intersection crashes, with 95% fewer injury incidents than human drivers in the same locations. That’s transforming the deadliest driving scenario.

The national math: If every US vehicle performed like Waymo, we’d prevent 33,000-39,000 deaths annually and save $0.9-1.25 trillion in societal costs. Even partial adoption at 27% would save ~10,000 lives per year. In terms of magnitude, this would be the equivalent of eliminating every pedestrian death nationally in a year.

The physics signature: Here’s what fascinates me: 47% of Waymo’s contacts involve less than 1 mph delta-V. They’re not just avoiding crashes; they’re converting unavoidable incidents into gentle bumps. It’s like having physics itself on your side.

We’re not talking about marginal safety gains. The data represents a fundamental shift from harm reduction to harm prevention.

The methodology matters: I used their dynamic geographic benchmarks (comparing like-for-like road conditions) and verified the findings hold across San Francisco, Phoenix, LA, and Austin. The safety advantage actually increases in more complex urban environments.

Link to raw data below….

Notes on my approach:

Analysis based on 96 million miles of Waymo Rider-Only (RO) data through June 2025, utilizing Waymo's dynamic geographic benchmarks to compare Waymo Driver performance against human drivers under similar road conditions and operational design domains.

The projections for national impact (deaths prevented, societal costs) involve several assumptions. Given Waymo's zero reported fatalities, the direct serious injury reductions were mapped to national fatality statistics using established NHTSA-derived ratios that correlate serious injury crash rates with fatality rates. This extrapolation assumes that Waymo's observed serious injury prevention capability would translate proportionally to fatality prevention. Societal cost savings are estimated by applying average per-fatality and per-injury economic costs (e.g., medical, lost productivity, quality of life) as published by NHTSA, scaling these national averages to the projected number of avoided fatalities and injuries based on Waymo's safety performance. These figures represent the potential annual impact if the Waymo Driver's safety profile were widely integrated into the national fleet.

@ethanteicher

[Michael Thomas @curious_founder]

The growth of grid-scale batteries in the US continues to explode.

Over the last 12 months, the country added 13.2 GW of battery capacity—50% more than a year ago.

🧵

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

holy shit, it’s here!

deepmind just released AlphaGenome.
an AI model that reads 1 million bases of DNA and predicts how any mutation changes molecular function

not just in single genes but across the entire regulatory genome.

DNA is code, and you are software
1/

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

Introducing AlphaGenome: an AI model to help scientists better understand our DNA – the instruction manual for life 🧬

Researchers can now quickly predict what impact genetic changes could have - helping to generate new hypotheses and drive biological discoveries. ↓

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@OfficialLoganK Your benchmarks show o1 underperform o1-preview on coding tasks while other benchmarks show the opposite... Any insights on why?

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field. In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would take a leading supercomputer over 10^25 years, far beyond the age of the universe(!).

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@adamscochran Go. Playing 15+ yrs and it only gets more fun the more I learn about it.

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@0xmatthewb @rstormsf The USD donation is labeled as a donation to https://t.co/6hEosBepEy - is that essentially identical to an ETH donation to Roman Storm? If not, how so?

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@rstormsf @bankless @bankless @rstormsf To maximize donations from the most supporters, you want to minimize friction to donating. If the only way to donate requires some people to dig a hardware wallet out of the back of a closet and incur a taxable event, a fewer % will.

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@rstormsf @bankless @rstormsf please accept donations via an additional platform that doesn't require donations in ETH. Considered donating multiple times in the past, but it'd be much easier to donate dollars directly. I'm certain I'm not the only person feeling inhibited this way.

[K Kulkarni @ks_kulk]

As @VitalikButerin points out, there are three Egyptian god cards that are about to be played in cryptography over the next several years:

1) ZK: prove computation without revealing data
2) FHE: compute on encrypted data
3) Indistinguishability obfuscation: obfuscate the internal workings of any program

General purpose zkVMs have already rapidly accelerated ZK by allowing anyone to develop any application.

The degree to which these protocols will transform the world is not appreciated.

We can have completely secure voting, credit scoring, juries, and more with very little overhead.

For me, this is a super exciting future.

https://t.co/T9JCYs8jV0

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@Austin_Federa Road Less Traveled (Peck)

7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey)

Art of Happiness (Dalai Lama)

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@ylecun Murder rate is an over simplification for "safety". SF has 20,000+ car break-ins/year and challenges with drug addict violence. "Safe" if you never go outside or leave anything in your car, perhaps.

[Edward Snowden @Snowden]

The arrest of @Durov is an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association. I am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications. It lowers not only France, but the world.

[George Mack @george__mack]

Steve Jobs email he sent himself 13 months before he died.

Whenever I re-read this, I regret waiting so long to have read it again.

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@BowenBelmer @RyanSAdams @KamalaHarris @Tim_Walz @BowenBelmer @RyanSAdams Sounds like you both agree on 99% and are probably having an X-based miscommunication. I think Ryan's point is that after Gensler's SEC it can be strategic to ask D's to openly state they need to change ways. This doesn't mean we need to trust their words

[P(X|Y) @m4thnerd]

@lex_node @JasonYanowitz No need to "treat them the same" in all regards. Keeping respectful lines of communication open &amp; acknowledging supportive individuals within each party can be done while maintaining a strategic posture based on the differences. Better to be receptive to allies where possible.