Introduce yourself, when did you first get interested in AI or quantum and what was the spark - the honest answer

[Ellie_28]

New thread for new members but also curious to hear from people who have been here a while. What was the moment or the thing that made AI or quantum computing go from background noise to something you actually cared about. Was it a paper, a product launch, a conversation, a book, a moment in a classroom.

For me it was reading about the 2016 AlphaGo matches against Lee Sedol when I was a student. The thing that hit me was not that the AI won, it was that it played moves that no human had ever played in the history of the game and they turned out to be correct. That implied something about the space of solutions that humans have not found yet that I have not stopped thinking about since.

Quan came later for me, honestly through reading about post quantum cryptography and working backwards from why it mattered into the actual physics. The harvest now decrypt later threat model was the thing that made it feel urgent rather than theoretical

[NightOwl94]

AlphaGo for me too, specifically the Move 37 moment. That was the first time I felt genuinely unsettled rather than impressed

[Amy]

For quantum it was reading a pop science explanation of the double slit experiment at about age 14 and spending a week not sleeping properly

[AnthonyCribb]

Same energy, the double slit result is the one that breaks something in your brain if you sit with it long enough

[NightOwl94]

I came through cybersecurity and landed on quantum because post quantum cryptography became part of my job, now I cannot stop reading about the underlying physics

[IronFist21]

Deepmind's protein folding work is what got me. The idea that a problem biologists had been working on for 50 years fell in one year to a model felt genuinely historic

[Faded Owen]

IBM opening up quantum hardware to the public through the cloud in 2016 was the moment for me, suddenly it was not abstract

[QubitZero13]

I was a sceptic until GPT-3 in 2020. I was convinced language models would always be obviously wrong in ways that made them useless. Then I read the output and updated hard

[Drifter]

The update from convinced sceptic is always the most interesting origin story honestly

[Aura]

Read Three Body Problem which has some quantum mechanics adjacent ideas in it and went down a rabbit hole that has not ended

[Anvil33]

My PhD supervisor showed me a quantum key distribution demo in a lab and said this is why RSA will not exist in its current form in twenty years. That was ten years ago and here we are

[Highland Dylan]

I just thought the forum name was cool and the first thread I read was interesting enough to stay