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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 122nd Weekly Dose of Optimism. Happy Thanksgiving — we hope you had a lovely holiday with family, friends, and loved ones. We’re thankful that we live in a world where there is never a dearth of stories to cover in the Weekly Dose — where every Friday there are at least five stories worth being thankful for. And were thankful for the scientists, researchers, ambitious teams, entrepreneurs, and leaders that are behind those stories.

And finally, we’re thankful that there are now over 200,000 readers that take the time each week to read the Weekly Dose each week. Doing this together each Friday is our favorite part of each week.

Let’s get to it.

(1) A Closer Look Into The Microsoft-Atom Computing Logical Qubit Study

Matt Swayne for Quantum Insider

Microsoft and Atom Computing have demonstrated significant progress in transitioning from physical to logical qubits using a neutral atom quantum processor, showcasing robust error correction and advanced computational capabilities.

Is quantum computing always going to be ten years away from being ten years away? That’s certainly seemed like the case since Richard Feynman and others proposed the idea in the early 1980s. But, we may actually be making some real progress, thanks to hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft dumping billions of dollars into research.

Now, Microsoft and Atom Computing achieved a major milestone in quantum computing by transitioning from physical to logical qubits using a neutral atom quantum processor. They entangled 24 logical qubits and performed computations on 28, leveraging advanced error-correction techniques to reduce errors—a critical step toward fault-tolerant quantum systems. Error reduction, a concept that always comes up when we write about quantum computing, is so crucial because quantum states are highly fragile, and even small errors can disrupt computations, making reliable, large-scale quantum processing and practical applications impossible without effective error correction.

This breakthrough from Microsoft and Atom underscores the potential of neutral atom platforms, offering scalability and robust error handling, and positions logical qubits as essential for practical quantum applications. And if we can unlock practical quantum computing, that means major breakthroughs in drug discovery, cryptography, materials design, and really any kind of super complex modeling.

If you believe that the brain is a quantum processor, it may even bring us one step closer to true ASI.

(2) This billion-dollar firm plans to build giant quantum computers from light. Can it succeed?

Elizabeth Gibney for Nature

PsiQuantum has ambitious goals to build a useful quantum machine by late 2027 — and has raised more than US$1 billion to do it.

Ten years away from being ten years away? Ψuck that!

PsiQuantum raised over $1 billion to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2027.

To achieve that aggressive timeline, PsiQuantum is burning the boats. Unlike its competitors, it’s skipping small prototypes and aiming straight for a million-qubit quantum computer. All or nothing, baby!

PsiQuantum’s approach leverages photonic qubits—particles of light—manipulated within silicon chips. In doing so, the company can utilize existing semiconductor and photonics technologies to enable scalable, fault-tolerant systems, bypassing many of the noise and stability (it always comes back to error reduction!) challenges faced by other quantum platforms. If their bet pays off, it may allow them to leapfrog major quantum players like Google, Microsoft, and IBM.

Now that would be a quantum leap! (sorry, tryptophan…)

(3) De novo design of antibodies enabled by Joint Atomic Modeling

From Nabla Bio

Today, we’re thrilled to share a major advance in our ability to design antibodies fully computationally. We developed a new AI protein design system, JAM, capable of designing high quality lead antibodies de novo given just a target protein sequence and/or structure.

Nabla Bio, a biotech startup, unveiled Joint Atomic Modeling (JAM), an AI-based platform capable of designing antibodies from scratch using only a target protein’s sequence or structure. JAM can create antibodies for tough-to-target proteins, like GPCRs, which are important for making new medicines but are hard to work with using older methods.

As a quick reminder, an antibody is a protein made by your immune system that helps fight infections. It recognizes and binds to harmful invaders like bacteria or viruses, marking them for destruction or blocking their ability to cause harm. Today, finding new antibodies involves a slow, expensive process of trial-and-error, typically using lab testing on cells or animals to identify and optimize molecules that bind to specific disease targets. JAM’s AI-first approach could speed up finding new antibodies, make the process cheaper, and help treat more diseases.

(4) Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting in 2025

Steve Bradt for MIT News

Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold.

Starting in fall 2025, MIT will offer free tuition to undergraduates from families earning less than $200,000, with families earning under $100,000 paying nothing for the full cost of attendance, including tuition, housing, and other expenses. MIT has long had financial aid programs that made attending the university accessible for most of the country’s brightest, young math and science minds. With this announcement, 80% of U.S. families are eligible for free MIT tuition. This year alone, the university has allocated nearly $170M to need-based financial aid, which means that 87% of students will graduate debt free.

We have a lot of hard, technical problems left to solve and we need the very best and brightest, from every socioeconomic background, to work on solving them. The list of notable MIT alums is too long to print here, but includes Buzz Aldrin, Richard Feynman, Sal Khan, Claude Shannon, Andrew Ng, Robert Noyce, Bob Metcalfe, Lisa Su, Charles Koch, Henry Singleton, Alfred P. Sloan, Jim Simons, Bob Swanson, Murray Gell-Mann, Diane Greene, William Shockley… the list goes on.

If that track record is any indication, expanding the pool of people who are able to attend MIT — and pursue their work free of debt post-college — is going to be a great thing for the world.

We’re looking forward to writing about some of the beneficiaries of this program in the Weekly Dose over the coming decades.

(5) Democratic Office of Government Efficiency

Government efficiency should not be a partisan issue. Republican or Democrat, you should want your government to work both harder and smarter for you, for your tax dollars to go a bit further, and for there to be less unnecessary red tape.

We’re excited about what DOGE is going to do on this front: auditing and slashing costs, bringing government workers back to the office, and reducing unnecessary regulations. We think this will have a real, tangible impact on how well the government serves its people. The symbolic impact, however, may have an even larger impact: if DOGE can make efficiency a winning political value proposition, then you are going to see leaders from both sides of the aisle adopt it. You may even start to see politicians competing over, and then bragging on X about, who can be the most efficient.

Democratic Pennsylvanian Governor Josh Shapiro is already starting. Shapiro has been on the efficiency train since before it was cool — his record-breaking 1-95 reconstruction put him on the map — and now he’s really leaning into it. That’ll force other Democrats to do the same.

And that’s a good thing for Americans. Efficiency should not be the end goal here. Ultimately, we’ll want not just an efficient government but an effective one, too. But in order to get there, there’s some fat that needs to be trimmed. The government cannot be effective until it is efficient.

Let’s Make Government Efficient Again! And I say that in the least partisan way possible.

(Bonus) Heartstrings | Apple Holiday | Hearing Aid feature on AirPods Pro 2

Today is Black Friday, the most commercial day of the year. Many of you will be making a purchase from Apple today, and some of you will even be purchasing AirPods. I know this, you know this, and Apple certainly knows this.

Ahead of today, a nakedly commercial day, Apple dropped one of the more emotional ads I’ve ever seen to feature the AirPods new hearing aid feature. They know how to balance commercial marketing and emotional marketing better than just about any company in the world. And with this new ad, they nailed it.

Apple's AirPods Pro 2 now include a hearing aid feature that lets users take a hearing test and customize sound settings for better listening. It's designed for those with mild to moderate hearing loss, making it easier to hear in different environments.

The feature isn’t just an excuse for a heartstrings commercial either. About 60% of the US population over 70 years old has mild-to-moderate hearing loss. It’s a pretty massive market opportunity — it’s not hard to imagine the 20M Americans that fit that description to not only upgrade to the newest AirPods, but also spend an increasing amount of time with those AirPods in. Whether that’s a good thing I think is still pretty TBD. Our relationship with Apple is a confusing one, but boy do they know how to put out an ad that makes you feel something.

Have a great weekend y’all.

Thanks to Baseten for sponsoring! We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan