Jake Taylor

Great fun today covering how verification unlocks agentic AI for science and engineering at @RIKEN_JP today. Many thanks to the RQC team and Prof Nakamura for hosting!

Presented at icerm.brown.edu/program/hot_to…. And keep an eye out for our public release!

Today @Axiomatic_AI’s Winston Yin showcased our upcoming tool that makes LEAN’s mathlib, the core source of truth for lean proofs today, accessible to agents — semantic theorem searches, similarity clustering, and extraction to support tactics and proving capabilities.

verifai-workshop.github.io arxiv.org/abs/2602.24273 arxiv.org/abs/2603.02668

Members of our LEAN team are showcasing how a minimal agent can make good proofs, and discuss the sorryDB, a living benchmark of unsolved problems at ICLR's verifai workshop today. Come say hi to Borja, Austin, Krystian and @LeopoldoSarra at the poster session!

@thisismattreed @nick_farina Incredible to see the progress!

Our new paper shows what we think is the best path to commercially-relevant fault tolerant quantum computing: every component (qubit, cryocmos controller, superconducting interconnect) made in a semiconductor fab and fit in a single commercial cryostat. arxiv.org/abs/2604.16216

@martinmbauer (* except Thorium 229)

When you probe protons or neutrons at low energy they look point-like. At energies of 100s of MeV they start to look like they have a shape. At higher energies > 1 GeV they show clear substructure and produce resonances e.g. because the quarks inside the proton can absorb energy by flipping their spin. Protons and neutrons are bound states of quarks, held together by the strong force (QCD) Quarks themselves look point-like so far, but physics never makes absolute statements. They could be bound states of more fundamental particles held together by a new, even stronger force of nature. This can be tested at the large hadron collider and the scale below which they look pointlike is 17000- 37000 higher than the 1GeV at which protons and neutrons show substructure. If such a new force exists it would be exceptionally strong

Gravity is probably quantized into gravitons. If not, however, there are experimental consequences. In particular, some level of irreversibility/noise. We finally classified ~all such models and calculated the noise. arxiv.org/abs/2603.26075

Wow @JILAscience Adam Kaufman to lead new Google effort in neutral-atom quantum computing blog.google/innovation-and…

It's official: @preskill now at Oratomic, a new Rydberg atom startup led by @DolevBluvstein and joined by @RobertHuangHY. Exciting times!

For any quantum gravity aficionados at APS, we are having a session on experiments — tabletop and quantum simulation — this afternoon.

Sad news – just learned that Tony Leggett, visionary condensed-matter theorist (and in passing, Nobel laureate) has passed away.

Protesting or at least opposing data centers is highly rational for everyone except the most direct equity holders hence beneficiaries of the AI and AI value chain companies. AI has a political constituency problem. Most people know that they are net losers from the trade off of “losing your job/economic value” in exchange for maybe “cure for cancer”, a free robot, UBI and permanent underclass status. They have also been sold pretty convincingly, by the spiritual leaders of the AI industry no less, that this was inevitable no matter what they did. At most they could stall it and prevent it from happening right away. In your typical lobbyist group issues, the benefits are highly concentrated among a few highly motivated and the costs are spread thin across a majority that’s unmotivated and not paying attention. As such the net losers typically have trouble organizing as an effective opposition. AI though has everyone’s attention and has made most if not all acutely aware of the existential stakes. Ask a random person off the street the first thing they’ll tell you about AI is that it’ll take their jobs. I’m not sure we’ve ever had an issue like that. The funny thing about the “AI inevitability” is that it still requires astronomically if not comically high economic cost with significant negative externality to come into being. The average person in a democracy could exercise their political rights to delay the “inevitable” at least in exchange for a stake. It’s perfectly rational, incentive compatible and shockingly they do.

Now we are actually going to do it. newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/02/18/fiv…

I will be enthusiastically supporting faculty legislation to cap the number of A's at Harvard at 20% (plus a bit). The collective action problem that has driven grades higher & higher over time is increasingly problematic. I hope other institutions consider similar steps.

CAISI is hiring for a bunch of exciting new roles, from partnerships to technical experts in AI x bio / chem and more. They're serious about bringing in strong researchers & engineers and letting them do good work. Based in DC or SF: nist.gov/caisi/careers-…

Today we’re releasing the International AI Safety Report 2026: the most comprehensive evidence-based assessment of AI capabilities, emerging risks, and safety measures to date. 🧵 (1/17)

people don't appreciate 1e-18 fractional accuracy enough. It took decades of development pushing many things to the extreme. For example, let's take a look at the optical cavity used for stabilizing the laser used for these atomic clocks. The most recent fight they had with the cavity is replacing the dielectric coating (sputtered SiO2/Ta2O5 or TiO2), which is amorphous, to stacks of crystalline GaAs/AlGaAs, because crystals have lower thermal mechanical noise than amorphous materials, and they got a cavity with 2.5e-17 stability with such quieter mirror coatings. [Lee2026] How good is 2.5e-17? When you are here, you are at the extreme opposite of "nothing ever happens". Everything is happening, and everything affects you. Temperature? It gives you at least two big headaches, (temperature fluctuation) * (thermal expansion), and thermal noise itself. So you optimize the cavity shape, you use single crystal for both the mirror spacer as well as the mirrors themselves so they are less lossy and thus less noisy, and you bond them together along the same crystal orientation as closely as possible. You also cooldown the cavity to reduce thermal noise, not only that, but you also operate at the CTE zero crossing point so temperature fluctuation matters less, thats why you see 124 K and 17 K for silicon cavities. Even with zero CTE, you still need few mK temperature control. Away from zero CTE, it may need to be stabilized to sub uK level. If you glance into cavities working at 4 K (i.e. small but not at zero CTE), you'll see crazy thermal damping systems to smooth out the temperature fluctuation of the 4 K cryostat (~20 mK), as well as find claims like "we now require only mK level control of the room temperature enclosure". [Zhang2017, Robinson2019] (they said "only" because some older cavities were at room T and controlled to sub mK [Ludlow2007], and they got tricks to reduce effects from room T.) (temperature gradient also gives you headache, which is why they choose silicon over glass, for its much higher thermal conductivity) Next is vibration/acceleration. Nothing is rigid, the cryostat vibrates, the earth rotates, and your cavity changes shape. Thats another motivation for silicon over glass, for its higher Young's modulus. So you make the cavity shape as symmetric as possible, and make the mounting fixture as symmetric as possible, and align them with the crystal axis because silicon's Youngs modulus not isotropic . Thus you also choose the optical axis to be the crystal axis with the highest Young's modulus. [Kessler2012] You also gotta align the mechanical axis with the optical axis and with the crystal axis, otherwise longitudinal acceleration would tilt the mirrors and change cavity length. The spacer shape is also a double cone so that it sags less and bends less under transverse acceleration. [Millo2009] Any mechanical resonance would be bad, so you also gotta use PEEK instead of PTFE for supporting the mounting ring, and push the lowest mechanical resonance to be as high freq as possible. Remember silicon's crystal structure? Remember its 3-fold rotational symmetry? That's why your support structure also has the same 3-fold symmetry. [Matei2016] If you have done all these properly, congratulations, now you might be ready to start fighting thermal noise in the dielectric mirror coatings. Harry2002: [Thermal noise in interferometric gravitational wave detectors due to dielectric optical coatings](doi.org/10.1088/0264-9…) Numata2004: [Thermal-Noise Limit in the Frequency Stabilization of Lasers with Rigid Cavities](doi.org/10.1103/PhysRe…) Ludlow2007: [Compact, thermal-noise-limited optical cavity for diode laser stabilization at 1e-15](doi.org/10.1364/OL.32.…) Millo2009: [Ultrastable lasers based on vibration insensitive cavities](doi.org/10.1103/PhysRe…) Hopcroft2010: [What is the Young's Modulus of Silicon?](doi.org/10.1109/JMEMS.…) Kessler2012: [A sub-40-mHz-linewidth laser based on a silicon single-crystal optical cavity](doi.org/10.1038/nphoto…) Matei2016: [A second generation of low thermal noise cryogenic silicon resonators](doi.org/10.1088/1742-6…) Zhang2017: [Ultrastable Silicon Cavity in a Continuously Operating Closed-Cycle Cryostat at 4 K](doi.org/10.1103/PhysRe…) Robinson2019: [Crystalline optical cavity at 4 K with thermal-noise-limited instability and ultralow drift](doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA…) Lee2026: [Frequency Stability of 2.5×10^−17 from a Si Cavity with AlGaAs Crystalline Mirrors](doi.org/10.1103/zgrm-c…)

Looks like some consolidation in quantum industry

When we started Axiomatic_AI, we were convinced that a form of math-grounded AI would eventually ace the Physics Olympiad; that we'd get there within 18 months is still a huge surprise and amazing accomplishment by the team. Congratulations everyone ! linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…