Prompted: Tech Talks

Eric Reilly

Prompted: Tech Talks gives you more information, not more opinions. Hard data, real-world examples, and expert perspectives on the topics shaping technology — so you can draw your own conclusions. This show exists because I needed it. I drive a lot, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I kept running into the same problem: most shows are built around conversation — sidebars, banter, tangents. I love that format, but sometimes I just want clean knowledge transfer. I work in cloud architecture, so I built a pipeline that generates exactly the show I was looking for, and I keep feeding it topics I want to go deeper on. If you have a topic you'd like covered, submit it at prompted.ericreilly.com/submit. ericreilly.com | github.com/ericreilly999 | linkedin.com/in/eric-reilly-sre/

Episodes

  1. 1 day ago

    Quantum at 100: From Thought Experiment to Trillion-Dollar Bet

    One hundred years after Werner Heisenberg worked out quantum mechanics on a North Sea island, the theory he started is both the foundation of modern technology and the center of a high-stakes industrial race. This episode traces the full arc: the 1925 breakthrough, the quantum technology already inside your phone and your hospital, how superposition, entanglement, and tunneling actually work, and the 2024-2026 breakthrough cycle — Google's error-correction and verifiable-advantage results, IBM's fault-tolerance roadmap, Microsoft's contested topological bet, and the public fight over how close any of it really is. IN THIS EPISODE • Why 2025 became the International Year of Quantum — and what a billion dollars of 2025 revenue does and doesn't prove • From Heisenberg's hay fever to a 2025 Nobel Prize: the century-long path from theory to hardware • Superposition, entanglement, tunneling, decoherence, and error correction — the concepts, without the math • Google, IBM, and Microsoft's three very different bets, and the physicists publicly disputing one of them • The questions nobody can answer yet: utility, scaling, the money, and the security clock SOURCES • Physics World — "International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025: here's all you need to know" (2025) — https://physicsworld.com/a/international-year-of-quantum-science-and-technology-2025-heres-all-you-need-to-know/ • McKinsey & Company — "Quantum Technology Monitor 2026: A commercial tipping point" (April 2026) — https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-technology/our-insights/mckinsey-quantum-technology-monitor-2026-a-commercial-tipping-point • NobelPrize.org — "Press release: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025" (October 2025) — https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2025/press-release/ • Berkeley News — "John Clarke, UC Berkeley emeritus professor, awarded 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics" (October 2025) — https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/10/07/john-clarke-uc-berkeley-emeritus-professor-awarded-2025-nobel-prize-in-physics/ • John Preskill — "Quantum Computing in the NISQ era and beyond" (2018) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00862 • Google Quantum AI et al. — "Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold," Nature (December 2024) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y • NIST — "NIST Releases First 3 Finalized Post-Quantum Encryption Standards" (August 2024) — https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/08/nist-releases-first-3-finalized-post-quantum-encryption-standards • The Quantum Insider — "Overview of 15+ Key Quantum Sensing Companies" (April 2026) — https://thequantuminsider.com/2026/04/10/overview-15-plus-key-quantum-companies-2026/ • Hartmut Neven, Google — "Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip" (December 2024) — https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/ • Google Research — "A verifiable quantum advantage" (October 2025) — https://research.google/blog/a-verifiable-quantum-advantage/ • IBM Newsroom — "IBM Sets the Course to Build World's First Large-Scale, Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer" (June 2025) — https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-06-10-IBM-Sets-the-Course-to-Build-Worlds-First-Large-Scale,-Fault-Tolerant-Quantum-Computer-at-New-IBM-Quantum-Data-Center • Physics World — "Experts weigh in on Microsoft's topological qubit claim" (2025) — https://physicsworld.com/a/experts-weigh-in-on-microsofts-topological-qubit-claim/ • Science News — "Microsoft's quantum chip got an upgrade. Critics are still skeptical" (June 2026) — https://www.sciencenews.org/article/microsoft-quantum-chip-upgrade-majorana • ITPro — "Jensen Huang changes his tune on quantum computing after January stock shock" (March 2025) — https://www.itpro.com/technology/jensen-huang-quantum-computing-backtrack

    38 min

  2. 1 day ago

    The Money Lifecycle: Two Seconds at the Register

    The first episode in the Money Lifecycle series follows a single card tap through the system most people never see. In the two seconds after you pay, your transaction crosses a terminal, a token vault, an acquirer, a global network, and your bank's fraud models — and that's just the authorization. The money itself takes days, and roughly $1.57 of every $100 stays behind. This episode traces both journeys, then maps the fights over that toll: a contested $38 billion settlement, a bill in Congress, a federal antitrust case, a $35 billion merger, and the biggest retailers in America exploring their own currencies. IN THIS EPISODE • The two seconds you never think about — and the record $187 billion merchants paid in 2024 • The hidden cast: issuers, acquirers, networks, and processors — and how tap-to-pay went from under 1% to over 60% of in-store Visa transactions • The double journey: the millisecond authorization sprint, then the days-long crawl of clearing and settlement — and where the $1.57 goes • Five live conflicts: the swipe-fee settlement merchants call window dressing, the Credit Card Competition Act, DOJ v. Visa, Capital One–Discover, and the stablecoin threat • What nobody knows: who decides what the toll should be — and who really pays for your rewards points SOURCES • Nilson Report — "Merchant Processing Fees in the United States Exceeded $187 Billion in 2024" (March 2025) — https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/19/3045828/0/en/Merchant-Processing-Fees-in-the-United-States-Exceeded-187-Billion-in-2024.html • Nilson Report — "Top Acquirers of Card Payments at US Merchants" (April 2025) — https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-acquirers-card-payments-us-120000068.html • Sen. Dick Durbin — "Durbin, Marshall Reintroduce The Credit Card Competition Act" (January 2026) — https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/durbin-marshall-reintroduce-the-credit-card-competition-act • 451 Alliance — "Contactless payments in the US: Crossing the tipping point" (January 2026) — https://blog.451alliance.com/contactless-payments-in-the-us-crossing-the-tipping-point/ • Stripe — "How card payment processing and settlement works" — https://stripe.com/resources/more/credit-card-payment-authorization-and-transaction-settlement-process • Visa — "Inside Visa's engine of global commerce" (October 2025) — https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/security-trust/inside-visa-global-commerce-engine.html • Visa — "Visa Issues 10 Billionth Token, Generating $40 Billion in Incremental E-commerce Globally" (June 2024) — https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2024/Visa-Issues-10-Billionth-Token-Generating-40-Billion-in-Incremental-E-commerce-Globally/default.aspx • Nilson Report — "Global Card Fraud Losses at $33 Billion" (January 2026) — https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/01/07/3214821/0/en/Global-Card-Fraud-Losses-at-33-Billion.html • NJBIA — "Visa and Mastercard Reach Proposed Settlement in Swipe Fees Litigation" (November 2025) — https://njbia.org/visa-and-mastercard-reach-proposed-settlement-in-swipe-fees-litigation/ • PYMNTS — "Visa and Mastercard Reach New Swipe Fees Settlement" (November 2025) — https://www.pymnts.com/credit-cards/2025/visa-and-mastercard-reach-new-swipe-fees-settlement • Wikipedia — "Payment card interchange fee and merchant discount antitrust litigation" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_interchange_fee_and_merchant_discount_antitrust_litigation • PYMNTS — "Banking and Credit Union Groups Call for Opposition to Credit Card Competition Act" (January 2026) — https://www.pymnts.com/bank-regulation/2026/banking-and-credit-union-groups-call-for-opposition-to-credit-card-competition-act/ • Electronic Payments Coalition — "More than 170 Organizations Oppose the Credit Card Competition Act" (November 2022) — https://electronicpaymentscoalition.org/2022/11/21/more-than-140-organizations-oppose-the-durbin-marshall-credit-card-competition-act/ • Mintz — "Two Sides to Every Monopolization Suit: DOJ Sues Visa for Debit Monopolization" (September 2024) — https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2191/2024-09-30-two-sides-every-monopolization-suit-doj-sues-visa-debit • Chargebacks911 — "What a Combined Capital One & Discover Means For Merchants" (2025) — https://chargebacks911.com/capital-one-discover-merger/ • PYMNTS — "Walmart, Amazon Explore Stablecoins as Senate Advances Regulatory Framework" (June 2025) — https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2025/walmart-amazon-explore-stablecoins-as-senate-advances-regulatory-framework/

    29 min

  3. 18 Apr

    Inside the Black Box

    Large language models went from an academic paper to global infrastructure in under three years. This episode covers what they actually are, how they work under the hood, and the key concepts — context windows, tool-use, reasoning models — that shape what these systems can and can't do. Part one of two; part two covers the model comparisons. IN THIS EPISODE • Why LLMs became infrastructure so fast — the numbers behind the adoption curve • The timeline: from the 2017 transformer paper to 300 million weekly users • How LLMs actually work: tokens, parameters, and why it's a probability engine, not a search engine • Context windows, tool-use protocols, custom models, and reasoning models explained • The capability debate: Karpathy and Sutskever vs. Yann LeCun — and why neither side has won • The open questions: training data supply, energy footprint, and accountability as AI goes agentic SOURCES • Vaswani et al. — "Attention Is All You Need," Google Brain (2017) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 • OpenAI — 300M weekly active users (December 2024) — https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/04/openais-active-user-count-soars-to-300-million-people-per-week.html • GitHub/Microsoft — Copilot 4.7M paid subscribers, up 75% YoY — Microsoft FY26 Q2 Earnings (January 2026) — https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/events/fy-2026/earnings-fy-2026-q2 • DeepSeek — R1 model release (January 2025) — https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 • Jensen Huang — World Economic Forum, Davos (January 2026) — https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-on-the-future-of-ai/ • Jensen Huang — CES 2026 keynote — https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2026-ces-special-presentation/ • Andrej Karpathy — "Intro to Large Language Models" lecture (2023) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g • Ilya Sutskever — NeurIPS 2024 keynote: "Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks: What a Decade" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yvBqasHLZs • Dario Amodei — "Machines of Loving Grace" (October 2024) — https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace • Yann LeCun — TIME magazine interview (January 2024) — https://time.com/6694432/yann-lecun-meta-ai-interview/ • Yann LeCun — Lex Fridman Podcast #416 (March 2024) — https://lexfridman.com/yann-lecun-3/ • Anthropic — Model Context Protocol (MCP), open standard (November 2024) — https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol

    16 min

  4. 18 Apr

    The Model Wars

    Part two of two on large language models. As of Q1 2026, there is no consensus winner among the frontier AI models — but there are real differences in architecture, infrastructure bets, and use-case fit. This episode maps the competitive landscape: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google at the top tier; Meta's Llama, DeepSeek, and Mistral in the open-source tier; and the product layer of companies like Harvey, Cursor, Perplexity, and OpenClaw building on top of all of them. IN THIS EPISODE • The three-tier competitive landscape — frontier labs, open-source, and the product layer • How OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google's infrastructure partnerships shape how they compete • What actually differentiates GPT, Claude, and Gemini — and where the benchmarks don't tell the whole story • The open-source case: Llama, DeepSeek R1, and Mistral's efficiency argument • Harvey, Cursor, Perplexity, and OpenClaw — why the product layer may be where the value is • The open questions: convergence, the open-source ceiling, and what agentic AI means for trust SOURCES • OpenAI/Microsoft — NVIDIA GB300 supercluster, $250B Azure commitment (2025) — https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/03/open-ai-amazon-aws-cloud-deal.html • OpenAI/AWS — $38B deal ending Microsoft cloud exclusivity (November 2025) — https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/03/open-ai-amazon-aws-cloud-deal.html • Anthropic/AWS — Project Rainier, 500K Trainium2 chips, named primary cloud partner (2024) — https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-project-rainier-ai-trainium-chips-compute-cluster • Anthropic/Google Cloud — Expanded TPU partnership, up to 1M chips (October 2025) — https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-our-use-of-google-cloud-tpus-and-services • Sundar Pichai — Google I/O 2024 keynote — https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/google-io-2024-keynote-sundar-pichai/ • Mark Zuckerberg — "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward," About Meta (July 2024) — https://about.fb.com/news/2024/07/open-source-ai-is-the-path-forward/ • Aravind Srinivas — Stanford GSB "View From The Top" interview (2024) — https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/perplexitys-aravind-srinivas-infinite-value-knowledge • Harvey AI — $11B valuation, $195M ARR (March 2026) — https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/25/harvey-confirms-11b-valuation-sequoia-triples-down/ • Cursor — $2B annualized revenue, 1M+ paying users (February 2026) — https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/cursor-has-reportedly-surpassed-2b-in-annualized-revenue/ • Perplexity AI — 30–45M monthly active users (2025) — https://www.demandsage.com/perplexity-ai-statistics/ • OpenClaw — open-source local AI agent, 50+ integrations (2025) — https://openclaw.ai • LMSYS Chatbot Arena — UC Berkeley, crowd-sourced blind pairwise rankings (ongoing, Q1 2026) — https://lmarena.ai • DeepSeek R1 — frontier-competitive reasoning at reportedly lower training cost (January 2025) — https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

    17 min
  • 4 Episodes

About

Prompted: Tech Talks gives you more information, not more opinions. Hard data, real-world examples, and expert perspectives on the topics shaping technology — so you can draw your own conclusions. This show exists because I needed it. I drive a lot, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I kept running into the same problem: most shows are built around conversation — sidebars, banter, tangents. I love that format, but sometimes I just want clean knowledge transfer. I work in cloud architecture, so I built a pipeline that generates exactly the show I was looking for, and I keep feeding it topics I want to go deeper on. If you have a topic you'd like covered, submit it at prompted.ericreilly.com/submit. ericreilly.com | github.com/ericreilly999 | linkedin.com/in/eric-reilly-sre/

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