W. J. Zeng

This f.a.q answers some questions that I am frequently asked.
I believe that paradise and reality are kinds of libraries. You can view a selection of my library as well as some collected quotes. They're background reading for many of the important questions and themes in my intellectual life.
Previously, I was a partner investing in physics/compute tech at quantonation, and before that I ran a quantum and advanced computing group at goldman sachs. Before that I was part of the initial team at rigetti quantum computing, where I was product lead for building and launching rigetti's quantum cloud service on top of its superconducting QPUs and for the forest quantum programming toolkit, including the open source libraries pyquil and grove. I helped develop the quantum instruction set called quil. My phd thesis at oxford applies abstract methods (mainly from categorical algebra) to the study of quantum algorithms and protocols. Before that I worked with superconducting qubit systems at yale and eth zurich.
If you want to learn more about how to get started with quantum computing, I taught an introductory course at stanford which you can follow online.
2026.06.01 - From Augmented Science to Streaming Science: a view for the future of science with AI [blogpost]
2026.04.30 - Compressed Sensing for Efficient Fidelity Estimation of GHZ States [arXiv]
2026.04.17 - New Quantum Era: Quantum Open Source [podcast] [youtube]
2026.03.10 - Metriq: an open, collaborative platform for benchmarking quantum computers [website] [blogpost] [arXiv] [github]
2026.02.22 - sci/acc: what happens to science after super-intelligence? [blogpost]
2026.02.18 - Quantonation Closes $260 Million Second Fund to Back the Industrialisation of Quantum and Physics-Based Technologies [blogpost] [news] [techcrunch]
2026.02.05 - Unitary Foundation 2025 Annual Report [blogpost] [pdf]
2026.01.22 - Quantum Foundations Podcast: Will quantum observers break quantum mechanics? [youtube] [spotify] [apple podcasts]
2025.02.13 - Unitary Foundation 2024 Annual Report [blogpost] [pdf]
2025.01.10 - Announcing Unitary Foundation [blogpost]
2024.11.11 - Mathematical meaning is not captured by meaning-as-use [blogpost] We propose that mathematical meaning is distinct from meaning-as-use because mathematical meaning is encoded in the world itself and not its representations.
2024.09.04 - Towards violations of Local Friendliness with quantum computers [arXiv] [quantum] We introduce an experimental program to demonstrate increasingly significant Local Friendliness violations, proposing that branch factor be used to quantify how much a system is like an observer. Then we use ion trap and superconducting quantum computers to show proof-of-concept violations at the largest branch factors yet.
2024.07.09 - The AI Boom is good for Quantum Tech [blogpost]
2024.05.24 - Quantum amplitude estimation from classical signal processing [arXiv] Through a connection to classical signal processing, we introduce a new amplitude estimation algorithm that beats state of the art performance.
2024.04.15 - Quantum Risk Analysis of Financial Derivatives [arXiv]
2024.03.11 - Unitary Fund 2023 Annual Report [blogpost] [pdf]
2024.01.09 - Assessing the Benefits and Risks of Quantum Computers [arXiv]
2023.11.01 - Field Builder Inteview with David Lang: On Quantum Technology [podcast]
2023.09.29 - Open Hardware in Quantum Technology [arXiv]
2023.09.04 - Local friendliness violations: experimental metaphysics and the nature of the observer @Math Models of Consciousness 2023 [video] #talk
2023.07.26 - Derivative Pricing using Quantum Signal Processing [arXiv]
2023.07.20 - Infinite Loops Podcast: Towards a Quantum Future (EP.171) [youtube] [podcast] Covers quantum computing, encryption and risk, agency and objective reality, technology and magic, and more...
2023.06.28 - Increasing the Measured Effective Quantum Volume with Zero Noise Extrapolation [arXiv]
2023.04.28 - Zero noise extrapolation on logical qubits by scaling the error correction code distance [arXiv]
2023.04.28 - Exact and approximate simulation of large quantum circuits on a single GPU [arXiv]
2023.03.20 - Unitary Fund 2022 Annual Report [blogpost] [pdf]
2022.11.22 - End-to-end resource analysis for quantum interior point methods and portfolio optimization [arXiv]
2022.11.11 - Hardware optimized parity check gates for superconducting surface codes [arXiv]
2022.10.21 - A Q# Implementation of a Quantum Lookup Table for Quantum Arithmetic Functions [arXiv]
2022.10.16 - Automated quantum error mitigation based on probabilistic error reduction [arXiv]
2022.10.13 - Testing platform-independent quantum error mitigation on noisy quantum computers [arXiv]
2022.10.04 - We should run Wigner's Friend experiments [blogpost] This blog post is about whether free choice and objective reality can coexist - not philosophically, but empirically - and how the tools of quantum computing could help us figure it out.
2022.09.15 - Using Q# to estimate resources needed for quantum advantage in derivative pricing [blogpost]
2022.06.25 - Unitary Fund experiments in public goods funding in quantum technologies @Funding the Commons 2022 [video] #talk A talk on (1) why quantum technologies are a good place to experiment with public goods funding (2) our work at Unitary Fund and (3) thoughts on Science as a decentralized autonomous organization.
2022.06.07 - Quantum Resources Required to Block-Encode a Matrix of Classical Data [arXiv] [blogpost]
2022.03.10 - Error mitigation increases the effective quantum volume of quantum computers [arXiv]