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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tries on Orion AR glasses at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., September 25, 2024. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

“Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” spanned the front of Mark Zuckerberg’s loose-fitting black shirt during his keynote at Meta’s Connect event in September. 

The words, donned in all-caps and gray font, were a play on the Latin phrase “Aut Caesar Aut Nihil,” which translates to “Either Caesar or nothing” or rather “All or nothing.” It was a fitting phrase for a company that in 2024 put the full weight of its resources behind its artificial intelligence strategy. 

Meta in April said it would raise its spending levels in 2024 by as much as $10 billion to support infrastructure investments for its AI efforts. Although the announcement sent shares plunging as much as 19% that evening, investors have come around to the company’s costly AI ambitions. Meta’s stock price hit a record on Dec. 11, and it’s up nearly 70% year to date as of the market’s close on Friday.

“It’s clear that there are a lot of new opportunities to use new AI advances to accelerate our core business that should have strong ROI over the next few years, so I think we should invest more there,” Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts in October.

He noted AI’s “positive impact on nearly all aspects of our work,” highlighting how the technology was key to rebuilding the company’s online advertising business that took a lashing from Apple‘s iOS privacy update in 2021. Additionally, he said AI underpins Meta’s more nascent projects, such as its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and experimental Orion augmented reality headset that Zuckerberg believes could represent “the next computing platform.”

Zuckerberg’s comments about AI underscore how the technology has become Meta’s top priority, directly impacting the company’s business and potentially paving the way for future revenue opportunities. Unlike the company’s more conventional services, like Instagram and Facebook, AI is an infrastructure technology that Zuckerberg wants hardwired into its various products, particularly as competitors like OpenAI continue to make inroads with consumers.

While OpenAI’s GPT family of AI models help power apps like ChatGPT, Meta’s family of Llama AI models feeds the company’s newer generative AI features like the Meta AI digital assistant. That chatbot represents Zuckerberg’s primary way to introduce generative AI technologies to its billions of users.

“Meta AI is on track to being the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of this year,” Zuckerberg said at Connect. 

The company has been increasingly releasing new generative AI features for advertisers to continue improving the efficiency of its online advertising platform. And with the hiring last month of Clara Shih, who had been Salesforce’s CEO of AI, to lead a new business AI group, Meta aims to build a more enterprise-focused unit in the new year.

The Meta AI logo is being displayed on a smartphone in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on June 10, 2024. 

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Meta’s all-encompassing approach to AI has led analysts to predict that Meta is positioned for more success in 2025.

Analysts at Jefferies chose Meta as one of generative AI’s “winners” heading into 2025, writing in a Dec. 15 note that the company’s massive user base represents “one of the richest surfaces to introduce Gen AI tools.” Truist Securities analysts said in a note last week that the Meta AI digital assistant could challenge Google’s search as “an answer engine for all kinds of queries” and that the social media company is likely to outperform in 2025, potentially benefiting from offering businesses more advanced customer service chatbots. 

“We believe META has a unique opportunity to introduce Gen AI tools to the almost 4B users & >200M businesses across its family of apps,” the Jefferies analysts wrote.

Meta declined to comment for this article, but pointed to previous statistics and executive comments about AI.

Meta AI’s expanding user base

Tourists are seen at the forecourt of the iconic Gateway of India as a digital display of messaging app WhatsApp is displayed, in Mumbai on August 25, 2023. 

Indranil Mukherjee | AFP | Getty Images

Among those users is Sonny Ravan, a music producer in Pune, India. Ravan said he finds Meta AI, which he uses through WhatsApp, helpful for learning about the history of songs that he enjoys. He also uses it as a tool to learn about people in the music industry who he plans to work with or meet, describing it as great for preparation.

Sathish Thiyagarajan, 30, a technical support engineer for marketing tech firm GoX.AI, said he’s increasingly using Meta AI as a search tool via WhatsApp, which he noted dominates the Indian market for mobile internet communications.

“While I’m talking with my family or my friends, if they’re saying something to me and I have to search something, I’m not going to go to Google,” said Thiyagarajan, of Chennai, India. “I’m just going to put the phone in the speaker mode, and I’ll immediately search through Meta AI.”

However, Thiyagarajan said he only uses Meta AI when he’s on his phone. If he’s at his computer, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is his preferred AI chatbot.

Not everyone is a fan of Meta AI’s bundling into WhatsApp’s search functions. 

Jawhar Sircar, 72, a retired government official in Kolkata, India, called the Meta AI search feature in WhatsApp “quite a nuisance.” That’s because whenever a user pauses while typing out a name in the search-find box, the Meta AI technology quickly “picks up whatever has been typed” and generates what he describes as unnecessary search prompt suggestions.

As far as the popularity of Meta AI in India, Sircar said he thinks the feature is mostly used by companies, technologists and other professionals who “are getting hooked to AI” alongside the Indian government’s continued investment in regional computing infrastructure.

“Professionals and companies have started using AI, but the general user has no need, at least not on the Meta platforms,” Sircar wrote in an email.

Meta’s AI strategy for advertisers

Advertising is still the key to revenue.

Meta said in December that over 1 million advertisers had used the company’s GenAI tools to create more than 15 million ads in a single month.

“We estimate that businesses using image generation are seeing a +7% increase in conversions,” Meta said at the time, regarding its image generation features.

While people may associate generative AI with the visually striking and sometimes surreal imagery derived from popular services like Dall-E or Midjourney, it’s more likely that the average small business advertiser uses Meta’s GenAI tools for more subtle tasks, said Stacy Reed, an online advertising and Facebook ads consultant. 

That includes using AI to create multiple versions of an ad’s headline, auto-resizing the size of ads so they look appropriate within users’ Instagram and Facebook apps, and repositioning certain images within the ads so that the promotions perform better, Reed said.

Advertisers that already write strong, creative copy can ask Meta’s GenAI tools for “a little bit more” help, Reed said. 

“That’s where you win with their AI tools,” she said.

Reed said the many small advertisers she supports aren’t associating the new features with AI. They “think that Meta is just enhancing the way you build ads,” Reed said.

How Meta's $19 billion bet on WhatsApp could finally start paying off

Celina Guerrero, an independent corporate sales and training consultant, said she uses Meta’s GenAI tools to help with writing headlines for her ads, but she said she finds Meta’s advertising interface to be confusing and constantly changing.

“It is visually overwhelming from a user experience,” Guerrero said.

Ahead of a Facebook ad campaign planned for January, Guerrero said she is debating how to use Meta’s GenAI tools for more in-depth tasks, like modifying her ad’s entire in-line copy. 

“I don’t want my copy to sound like ChatGPT,” Guerrero said, referring to the sterile, run-of-the-mill AI-generated text that’s proliferating the web. “I have two options: One, I don’t use the variations, or two, I spend an inordinate amount of hours editing it.”

Most big companies and advertising agencies are turning to more marketing-specific tools for their generative AI-based ad campaigns, said Jay Pattisall, principal analyst at Forrester. Those services are more robust than Meta’s built-in AI ad tools, he said.

Still, the mere introduction of simple GenAI tools is beneficial to Meta considering it dominates the digital ads market along with Google. Meta’s generative AI tools just have “to be good enough to squeeze out more investment” from advertisers, said Maurice Rahmey, CEO of performance marketing firm Disruptive Digital and a former Facebook customer manager.

“It’s better for their business, even if it’s just those small, incremental changes,” Rahmey said “It’s a business of scale.”

Clara Shih, Former CEO of Salesforce AI

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

What’s next for Meta’s enterprise play?

With Meta’s hiring of Shih from Salesforce in November, some analysts say Meta could make an enterprise technology push with its Llama family of open-source AI models

Llama’s advancements “represent a significant opportunity for businesses to drive more efficiencies and significantly improve the experiences they offer their customers,” Meta monetization head John Hegeman said in a statement.

Shih, who was one of CNBC’s 2024 changemakers, rejoined Salesforce in 2020 after previously working at the company from 2006 through 2009. As part of her most recent role at Salesforce, Shih helped oversee Einstein GPT for Service and Sales, a GenAI product intended for sales and customer support staff.

During her first stint at Salesforce, Shih created a business app that let users connect their Salesforce customer relationship software with their Facebook connections. In 2009, she wrote “The Facebook Era,” a book intended for professionals to better understand how to use social networks for business.

Multiple former Meta AI and product leaders told CNBC that Shih’s vast experience will be helpful considering the company has failed in previous attempts at building enterprise software. 

Meta announced in May that it plans to shut down Workplace, its business communications product, by 2026. And after buying enterprise startup Kustomer for about $1 billion in 2020, Meta spun it out in 2023 in a deal that was reportedly valued at $250 million.

The most logical step for Meta would be to create a larger business around WhatsApp, said Ralph Schackart, an internet equity analyst at investment bank William Blair. Specifically, WhatsApp could help businesses build customer-service chatbots using Meta’s GenAI, Schackart said. 

“Longer term, this is going to evolve into customized sales agents, which is a $3 trillion-plus industry,” Schackart said about Meta’s WhatsApp business AI chatbot opportunity.

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Bigger bitcoin HODL: Time for 10% to 40% of portfolio in crypto, says financial advisor Ric Edelman

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Bigger bitcoin HODL: Time for 10% to 40% of portfolio in crypto, says financial advisor Ric Edelman

Four years ago, financial advisor Ric Edelman went out on a limb in saying everyone should hold cryptocurrencies. But how much? Low single digits was his recommendation.

In his “The Truth about Crypto” book in 2021, Edelman said as low as a 1% allocation was reasonable.

A lot has changed.

This week, Edelman said financial advisors should be recommending anywhere from 10% to 40% allocations to cryptocurrencies, and he is aware it’s quite a shift in his own thinking.

“Today I am saying 40%, that’s astonishing,” he told CNBC’s Crypto World in an interview. “No one has ever said such a thing.”

But the “why” is the more important thing.

For one, it’s because of the massive change seen in the industry, what he called “the evolution of crypto in the past four years,” he said.

Four years ago, Edelman said, we didn’t know if governments would ban bitcoin, or if the technology would be obsolete, and if consumers and institutions would adopt it.

“Today, all those questions have been resolved,” said Edelman, who heads the Digital Assets Council of Financial Advisors. “It’s radically changed and is now a mainstream asset.”

For sure, the more mainstream crypto becomes, the more it will feature across investment portfolios. Bitcoin ETFs have been taking in billions this year, among the top asset classes in ETF inflows this year, one sign of crypto’s arrival on the radar of more financial advisors and long-term investors.

The other big shift Edelman sees longer-term, and just as important to his view of crypto allocation, is the end of the traditional 60/40 model of long-term investing, with 60% in stocks and 40% in bonds, which Edelman says is obsolete due to increased longevity, and life expectancy in the U.S., that has risen from 47 in the 1900s to 85 today, and is projected to potentially reach as high as 100 over the next 30 years if technological advances related to medicine proceed. 

“If you’re a financial advisor and you had a 30-year-old client who was saving for their long-term future, you would tell them to put 100% of their money in stocks, because they have 50 years to go,” said Edelman. “Today’s 60-year-old is kind of like yesterday’s 30-year-old,” he added.

“You need to get better returns than you can get from bonds and you need to hold equities longer than ever before,” Edelman said. And as that allocation model shifts away from the classic 40% bond allocation, he said crypto needs to play a much bigger role in investing.

“Bitcoin prices don’t move in sync with stocks or bonds or gold or oil or commodities,” Edelman said. 

He added that investors are starting to recognize it as a “wonderful way to improve modern portfolio theory statistics. “The crypto asset class offers the opportunity for higher returns that you’re likely to get in virtually any other asset class,” Edelman said.

Some analysts predict bitcoin will hit $150,000-$250,000 by the end of this year and $500,000 by the end of this decade. Edelman said, “That’s a conservative estimate compared to what others are saying.” 

In other crypto news of note on Friday:

Crypto hacks hit a new record in the first half of the year.  According to TRM Labs, bad actors raked in over $2.1 billion in at least 75 different hacks and exploits, setting a new record. Attacks on crypto infrastructure, like stealing private keys and seed phrases or compromises of front-end software, accounted for over 80% of the funds stolen in 2025’s first half. 

Trump housing advisor tells CNBC about crypto mortgage plan. Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, joined CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Friday to discuss the plan he released this week to have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac count crypto as a federal mortgage asset.

Senate targets end of September for crypto bill. Senator Tim Scott, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said at an event on Thursday that legislation to establish rules for U.S. crypto markets will be finished by the end of September.

You can can catch more on those headlines in today’s Crypto World episode above.

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Coinbase is the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 in June, and may have even more room to run

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Coinbase is the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 in June, and may have even more room to run

People watch as the logo for Coinbase, the biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, is displayed on the Nasdaq MarketSite jumbotron at Times Square in New York on April 14, 2021.

Shannon Stapleton | Reuters

Coinbase is the top performer in the S&P 500 in June, boosted by positive regulatory updates, product launches and, of course, its very inclusion in the benchmark stock index at the end of May.

The crypto exchange’s outperformance in the S&P 500 extends back to the April 8 market low, just after President Donald Trump’s initial sweeping tariffs announcement sent stocks sinking.

Coinbase is now on pace for its best month since November, third straight monthly gain — 43% in June alone — and its first three-month rally since the end of 2023. On Thursday, the stock hit its highest level since the day of its initial public offering in 2021.

“The S&P 500 inclusion, the Senate’s passage of the GENIUS Act and very strong performance of Circle negated the false narratives for Coinbase and people are waking up,” Oppenheimer analyst Owen Lau told CNBC.

Restraints lifted

“The two things holding Coinbase back were the issues of fee compression — it hasn’t happened and in fact, Coinbase has been generating positive earnings consistently, which is why they were included in the S&P 500 — and regulatory uncertainty,” he said. “Many people don’t believe there will be any consensus coming out of Congress … the fact is we’re seeing the passage of the GENIUS Act.”

The GENIUS Act establishes the first federal framework for dollar-pegged stablecoins, granting sweeping authority to the Department of Treasury and opening the door to banks, fintechs, and retailers.

Even with Coinbase’s 44% run this month, the stock has room to appreciate further, according to Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens. He said the market isn’t fully connecting the dots around Coinbase’s close relationship with Circle Internet Group. Circle debuted on the New York Stock Exchange June 5 and has soared more than 500% since.

According to a revenue share agreement, Coinbase keeps 100% of the revenue generated on all USDC held on Coinbase, plus nearly 50% of all other USDC revenues, “which is 99% of Circle’s current revenue,” Ryan said.

USDC is the stablecoin issued by Circle. Stablecoins are a subset of cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of real-world assets. About 99% of all stablecoins are tethered to the price of the U.S. dollar.

Another way to play

“Yet, Coinbase doesn’t incur any of the operating costs borne by Circle,” Ryan said. “If the market is right on the current bullish view for Circle, Coinbase is another way to play that — and with the financial connection described, it would seem there’s a lot more value left in Coinbase.”

Coinbase, whose core business is crypto trading, has been expanding its suite of crypto services over the past several quarters to include areas like custody, staking, wallet services and stablecoins.

This month, the company beefed up its subscription plan by offering it with its first crypto-backed credit card in partnership with American Express. It also introduced a partnership with Shopify and debuted a stablecoin payments service for e-commerce. JPMorgan also partnered with the crypto company to launch its own version of a stablecoin, which it’s calling a “deposit token” on Coinbase’s in-house built blockchain, Base.

“There’s clearly a sentiment trade occurring in crypto as institutional investors are looking at the space, many for the first time, and want to express a positive view on crypto evolving from a speculative asset class to one of utility — with legislative clarity as the key catalyst — and Coinbase is the most direct way to invest in that thesis,” Ryan said.

Volume concern

If there’s one concern, it’s in trading volume, said Oppenheimer’s Lau. The average daily volume of crypto transactions on the Coinbase platform has been trending lower since April, which could be a risk for the company and other crypto trading providers heading into the second half of the year.

The analyst is optimistic the regulatory outlook can turn that around though, specifically if the industry gets market structure legislation on top of stablecoin legislation.

“If the GENIUS Act brought us to ‘stablecoin summer’ then I believe that the eventual passage of the CLARITY Act can bring us into altcoin summer,” Lau said. “So at the end of this year, I do see another catalyst that can reverse this trend because there will be animal spirits, people will be buying altcoins like crazy if we get past the market structure bill.”

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Quantum computing is having a moment. But the technology remains futuristic

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Quantum computing is having a moment. But the technology remains futuristic

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum computing chip

Microsoft

It doesn’t quite have the buzz of artificial intelligence, but quantum computing is having a moment of its own.

Some of the most powerful institutions in the world, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and the U.S. government, are spending many millions of dollars in a race to develop and build the first practical quantum computer.

Startups focused on quantum technology attracted about $2 billion last year, according to a McKinsey & Co. report, as investors pile into an industry that could have nearly $100 billion in revenue within a decade.

There isn’t much business today, though. In total, quantum computing companies generated under $750 million in revenue in 2024, according to the same report.

But more and more, we’re hearing about a big breakthrough.

In the past year, Microsoft unveiled its first quantum chip, Google executives said the technology may only be five years away, Amazon showcased its error-correcting quantum processor and IBM outlined its plan to build a meaningful quantum computer by 2029.

Joining them are scores of smaller companies and universities working on the underlying mathematics, software or potential business model. Some of the companies are even publicly traded, and can see their stocks soar or collapse based on a kernel of news.

In January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sent quantum computing stocks reeling when he said 15 years was “on the early side” in considering how long it would be before quantum computing would be useful. He said at the time that 20 years was a time frame that “a whole bunch of us would believe.”

Two months later, he walked back the comments, but also expressed surprise that they moved markets, or that there were even markets to be moved.

“How could a quantum computer company be public?” Huang said in March.

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Right now, there isn’t anything useful that quantum computers can do. They’re purely for research.

But the promise is clear. If the technology works, it can crunch certain kinds of numbers and do some tasks that are currently impossible on a traditional computer, or that would require so much time that the universe would end before they were completed.

To imagine a quantum computer, you have to fundamentally change how you consider what it means to compute.

A traditional computer works because there are billions of transistors on every chip. Those transistors can be ones or zeros — on or off. In large numbers, transistors can represent nearly every number, refer to parts of the system’s memory, and do arithmetic. That’s how every computer in the world works today.

In a quantum computer, the system uses qubits instead of transistors. It’s far more complicated than ones and zeros. Whether qubits are on or off is determined by quantum mechanics, and all of the qubits are “entangled,” which means a change in one will affect the probability of the others.

Making qubits work can require significant infrastructure. For example, some quantum computers have to be operated at very cold temperatures, near absolute zero.

So far, a lot of the applications for quantum have to do with simulating chemistry and physics.

“Quantum computers will not be the compute of choice for every application, and that’s OK,” said Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s vice president of advanced quantum development. “Even if we just use quantum computers for material science and chemistry, 96% of the world’s manufactured goods rely on chemistry and material science.”

Encryption

There’s one well-understood use for quantum computing today: encryption. That’s why the U.S. government and others around the world are closely tracking the technology’s development. It matters for national defense.

“The fear is that quantum computers will be able to crack our digital secrets,” said John Young, operating chief at the Americas division of Quantum eMotion, a quantum security company.

Currently, most passwords, WhatsApp texts, financial transactions and other important messages are encrypted, which means they’re scrambled and can’t be read if the data is stolen or observed. But quantum computers will be able to factor numbers quickly, which could allow hackers or other attackers to efficiently find the codes needed to decrypt important secrets.

Security researchers worry about what they call Q-Day, or the day when an effective quantum computer is created. They predict chaos when passwords and encryption start to mysteriously fail.

“Alongside its potential benefits, quantum computing also poses significant risks to the economic and national security of the United States,” the Biden White House said in 2022, in a national security memo. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer “could jeopardize civilian and military communications, undermine supervisory and control systems for critical infrastructure, and defeat security protocols for most Internet-based financial transactions,” the memo said.

An exclusive first look inside Amazon’s quantum computer lab

There’s no practical application or algorithm that can be run on a quantum computer that can’t today be accomplished on a normal silicon-based, digital computer.

However, several groups say they’ve proven “quantum supremacy,” indicating that they’ve run a problem on a quantum computer that would’ve taken far longer with a traditional computer. The actions were all abstract.

Google was the first to declare quantum supremacy in 2019, describing its quantum computer’s accomplishment as a “benchmark.” The task it performed is called random circuit sampling, which is basically only used to test quantum computers.

Google says that researchers gave a computer random instructions to make a problem as complex under quantum mechanics as possible. Its researchers were then able to show that a quantum computer is faster at deciphering the quantum problem. Last year, Google said that its new, faster quantum computer Sycamore had expanded the performance gap.

In terms of future real-world applications, most of the potential for quantum computers is in the realms of medicine, chemistry and materials research.

Google points to drug discovery, or finding molecules that could be useful medicines. It also says that quantum computers will be able to do the science needed to commercialize fusion energy.

When Microsoft announced its first quantum chip in February, the company highlighted chemistry and materials science problems, like why some materials corrode, or how to compost plastic.

There is also some optimism that quantum computers will be well suited for generating training data for AI applications, especially for situations or problems with a huge number of potential solutions.

A general view of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 21, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

A Google researcher maintains a webpage that catalogs many of the most prominent quantum algorithms.

The most famous is Shor’s algorithm, which showed that a quantum computer would be able to find prime factors of a large number far faster than is currently possible on a digital computer.

When the algorithm was discovered in 1994, it ignited some concern from militaries around the world. Many of them use an encryption method called RSA, which needs the process of factoring large numbers to be difficult in order to keep data secret.

Worry about China

The fear is that a quantum computer would allow an adversary like China to quickly decode U.S. military messages or consumer banking transactions.

“Without effective mitigation, the impact of adversarial use of a quantum computer could be devastating to [national security systems] and our nation,” the Pentagon said in 2021.

Microsoft has acknowledged the national security factor, and has even framed quantum security as a race against China.

“While most believe that the United States still holds the lead position, we cannot afford to rule out the possibility of a strategic surprise or that China may already be at parity with the United States,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post in April.

The government has led an effort to move encryption to so-called post-quantum methods, which can’t be broken by a quantum computer. Companies such as Apple have already started to integrate post-quantum encryption into its services like iMessage.

But past communications can still contain secrets. Intelligence agencies and other hackers often collect encrypted data in the expectation that one day it can be decrypted.

For now, much of the work in quantum is still fairly academic.

Most of the advanced hardware companies today are working on “error correction,” or a variety of methods meant to reduce the number of errors, and make them less harmful when they happen.

In present-day quantum computers, the qubits fail as often as 1 out of 1,000 times they are used, according to Microsoft researchers. Microsoft said last week that it was able to reduce the error rate by 1,000-fold thanks to a new approach.

Several improvements in error correction have been announced over the past year, which is one reason why researchers and engineers are increasingly confident that they’ll be able to build a quantum computer.

The next issue to address is scaling up the computers.

Google’s new Willow chip has 105 qubits. Microsoft’s Majorana chip has eight. IBM’s Starling plans to have 200 qubits. Amazon’s Ocelot chip has 14 qubits. In the coming years, these numbers have to go way up. Google and Microsoft say a truly useful quantum computer will need 1 million qubits.

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