After AI, Quantum Computing Eyes Its 'Sputnik' Moment (phys.org) 52
The founder of Cambridge-based Riverlane, Steve Brierley, predicts quantum computing will have its "Sputnik" breakthrough within years. "Quantum computing is not going to be just slightly better than the previous computer, it's going to be a huge step forward," he said. Phys.org reports: His company produces the world's first dedicated quantum decoder chip, which detects and corrects the errors currently holding the technology back. In a sign of confidence in Riverlane's work and the sector in general, the company announced on Tuesday that it had raised $75 million in Series C funding, typically the last round of venture capital financing prior to an initial public offering. "Over the next two to three years, we'll be able to get to systems that can support a million error-free operations," said Earl Campbell, vice president of quantum science at Riverlane. This is the threshold where a quantum computer should be able to perform certain tasks better than conventional computers, he added.
Quantum computers are "really good at simulating other quantum systems", explained Brierley, meaning they can simulate interactions between particles, atoms and molecules. This could open the door to revolutionary medicines and also promises huge efficiency improvements in how fertilizers are made, transforming an industry that today produces around two percent of global CO2 emissions. It also paves the way for much more efficient batteries, another crucial weapon in the fight against climate change. "I think most people are more familiar with exponential after COVID, so we know how quickly something that's exponential can spread," said Campbell, inside Riverlane's testing lab, a den of oscilloscopes and chipboards. [...]
While today's quantum computers can only perform around 1,000 operations before being overwhelmed by errors, the quality of the actual components has "got to the point where the physical qubits are good enough," said Brierley. "So this is a super exciting time. The challenge now is to scale up... and to add error correction into the systems," he added. Such progress, along with quantum computing's potential to crack all existing cryptography and create potent new materials, is spurring regulators into action. "There's definitely a scrambling to understand what's coming next in technology. It's really important that we learn the lessons from AI, to not be surprised by the technology and think early about what those implications are going to be," said Brierley. "I think there will ultimately be regulation around quantum computing, because it's such an important technology. And I think this is a technology where no government wants to come second."
Quantum computers are "really good at simulating other quantum systems", explained Brierley, meaning they can simulate interactions between particles, atoms and molecules. This could open the door to revolutionary medicines and also promises huge efficiency improvements in how fertilizers are made, transforming an industry that today produces around two percent of global CO2 emissions. It also paves the way for much more efficient batteries, another crucial weapon in the fight against climate change. "I think most people are more familiar with exponential after COVID, so we know how quickly something that's exponential can spread," said Campbell, inside Riverlane's testing lab, a den of oscilloscopes and chipboards. [...]
While today's quantum computers can only perform around 1,000 operations before being overwhelmed by errors, the quality of the actual components has "got to the point where the physical qubits are good enough," said Brierley. "So this is a super exciting time. The challenge now is to scale up... and to add error correction into the systems," he added. Such progress, along with quantum computing's potential to crack all existing cryptography and create potent new materials, is spurring regulators into action. "There's definitely a scrambling to understand what's coming next in technology. It's really important that we learn the lessons from AI, to not be surprised by the technology and think early about what those implications are going to be," said Brierley. "I think there will ultimately be regulation around quantum computing, because it's such an important technology. And I think this is a technology where no government wants to come second."
What happened to Blockchain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What happened to Blockchain? (Score:4, Funny)
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Might not be so much ready cash coming it's way now though. AI has drained a lot of coffers.
Re:What happened to Blockchain? (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm using AI on the blockchain to mint quantum NFTs.
VCs, my DMs are open!
Man predicts he will win lottery (Score:5, Funny)
Skeptical words: Medicine, environment, ... (Score:2)
Quote: "revolutionary medicines and also promises huge efficiency improvements in how fertilizers are made, transforming an industry that today produces around two percent of global CO2 emissions. It also paves the way for much more efficient batteries, another crucial weapon in the fight against climate change"
Hits most of the technology speculation VC selling heartstring tugging words
- Revolutionay medicines
- Food - Better efficiency in producing fertilizers
- More efficient batteries
- Climate change
- CO2
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Because the fire in the soul of the investors has to be carefully stoked, lest the free money flows available to shrewd liars like Sam Altman begin to shrink. Yeah, I know yours was a rhetorical question.
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I think he means "after AI" in the same way that you might say "after crypto" or "after VR". He's predicting that the "next big thing" after the hype dies down will be quantum computing, so please throw money at him.
Quantum wants its PR back (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, for the past half-decade or so - Quantum Computing was the thing. But (understandably) it's progressed extremely slowly and still is more basic science than anything else... and we still don't know if it's going to amount to anything.
Meanwhile, the AI hype train came roaring into the station - now it's the thing. The quantum folks aren't happy about that at all - they miss being in the spotlight (and I imagine they also miss some of the funding that's being redirected).
It probably also doesn't help that modern humans seemingly have the attention span of a hyperactive gnat.
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I think it's marketing depts that lack attention spans. The "Move fast and break things" mantra has them all in constant spin mode, and spread like a contagion.
Separately, the ridiculously high total spend on AI may just have warned investors off betting on the web wide world ... for a while at least.
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Re:Quantum wants its PR back (Score:4, Informative)
Text generation models have become more powerful year after ever since RNNs started to do something like 10 years ago.
I think you'll find ELIZA predates that by quite a bit. ELIZA was first conceived and written in 1964, making it 60 years old now.
ELIZA is rather stilted in its conversations at times, and you can build sentences that result in nonsensical output. A much better program call RACTER emerged around 1984, described in the Computer Recreations section of the January 1985 [scientificamerican.com] issue of Scientific American.
Basically, to me ChatGPT (and other generative AI systems) are nothing more than these systems dressed up with a new name and fresh coat of paint.
Re:Quantum wants its PR back (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing of the sort. ChatGPT is amazing.
Eliza is just string manipulation. Looks clever but does exactly one thing.
ChatGPT does high quality translation on a near-professional level. It can deal with typos, slang, and unconventional spelling like used by Hagrid in Harry Potter. It can even translate random manga pages and memes.
If you're not very old you may not remember what the first systems -- in Eliza's day -- were like. They just did syntactic analysis of each sentence, and looked up words in a dictionary. They couldn't relate what happened in one sentence to the next, constantly picked the wrong meaning for a translation, got confused by trademarks like "Windows" (translating that literally), choked on any misspellings, couldn't deal with non-standard spelling like "Let's goooo!", and so on and so forth. Translation in those days was barely good enough to get the gist of what somebody was talking about, and whether it was worthwhile to seek a human to actually translate things properly.
It's freaking magic, man.
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Statistical models are not magic. They do have easily conceived of limits, however.
Eliza's 'configuration' file in the implementation I had was about 50 lines, and I could have trimmed it down to 10 or so if I had eliminated the customization that made it sound more like me when talking to people. I used it as a BBS door file - like a game called "Chat with the Sysop". People would sit there for long periods of time trying to talk to 'me'. It wouldn't pass a Turing test, but I also wonder about the call
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While true, rational human behavior is also not magic.
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'Artificial Intelligence' Is (Mostly) Glorified Pattern Recognition https://www.moonofalabama.org/... [moonofalabama.org]
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IIUC, quantum computing is only known to be superior to classical computing on a rather restricted range of problems. Some of them are quite important (predicting quantum transition in particular molecules, e.g., or breaking internet encryption), but it's still a rather restricted range. And that's assuming that you have a powerful quantum computer.
FWIW, there are many situations where analog computing is more powerful than digital computing, but it's a very restricted range of problems. Some of them are
Company spokesbot has it all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
He should instead be pushing Quantum AI, The One True AI. Then ask Elmo for some cash to realize the "dream".
Like fussion energy - waiting for years (Score:2)
For me quantum computing seems like fussion energy - for dozens of years they tell the breakthrough/sputnik moment is near...
But it is always couple years ahead, regardless if it is 2024, 2014 or 2004
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Isn't 'sputnik' Russian for 'potato' ?
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Isn't 'sputnik' Russian for 'potato' ?
Nope, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], it's spouse or traveling companion. Potato is Kartophel', the same as in German.
Re: Like fussion energy - waiting for years (Score:2)
Sputnik was a real thing. Potatoes were purely theoretical. Something peasants could only dream of.
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Fussion is not a word. I gather you're missing a spell checker.
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It seems to be progressing slowly (Score:2)
We've managed to commercialise quantum key distribution [wikipedia.org] and quantum annealing [wikipedia.org] which were still science fiction at the beginning of the century. China has claimed to have developed a quantum radar [wikipedia.org] with very high noise immunity and jamming rejection.
There might not ever be a massive breakthrough in quantum computing, like a system that can factor RSA keys using Shor's algorithm. It might just continue to slowly find mundane applications.
Quantum Computing (Score:2)
I did some searching. It seems to me that these things aren't yet practical, but they are certainly complicated. IBM has a quantum computer with 1,000 qubits that they charge you $1.60 per second to access and run your program on. https://docs.quantum.ibm.com/ [ibm.com] -- my gut feeling looking at the documentation is that we're still in the infancy and that you have to "design your own quantum computer" with the API in order to make ASIC-like circuit pathways and then run them on IBM hardware.
I still feel like we'r
Can someone explain something to me (Score:2)
Information processing requires energy no matter how you do it. However with quantum computers a lot of it seems to happen automagically for free (wave function collapse , multiple universes blah blah) which to me sounds like either I'm fundamentally misunderstanding something or they are.
Can someone explain how you can get something from essentially nothing?
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Virtual particles [wikipedia.org].
Re: Can someone explain something to me (Score:3)
Deficit spending.
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Can someone explain how you can get something from essentially nothing?
As a simpler example, take analog computing [wikipedia.org]. The trick is to find (or set up) a natural phenomenon that works analogously to the mathematical/algorithmic problem you want to solve, then observe that phenomenon in action and measure the magnitude of its outcome -- and presto, you get an (approximate) result to your calculation "for free", because the physical world calculated it for you directly.
Quantum computing is pretty much the same thing, except that instead of measuring the results of a classical phen
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That sort of makes sense, but how can you find an a physical quantum analogy to cracking crypto codes for example?
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Cracking crypto codes is prime factorization. A good quantum computer could do that LOTS faster than a classical computer. Unfortunately, noise REALLY gets in the way.
P.S.: Shor's algorithm (and the improved versions) works. It does. But it needs a good quantum computer to run on. I forget just what the speed-up is, but IIRC it's an exponential function. So if you need to keep something secret for a decade or more, don't depend on public key encryption.
The thing is, it's only a speed-up. You *could*
Well yeah, but what is the news? (Score:3)
I mean the founder of a company that does things for X thinks that X is going to be important. That's normal, if he wouldn't think that, he'd not be doing that. In a way it's his job. While error correction for quantum computers is an important step, there is no indication of his company reaching meaningful goals in that area. Raising investor money neither is any indication as we should have learned from Jucero, Theranos and other spectacular failures. Investors aren't the smartest people around when it comes to technology.
Medicines and fertilizer? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Valid points, but those are just problems to be solved. It means we don't get the improvements tomorrow, but in a couple of years. (Maybe a bit more. There are always problems with translating theory into engineering.)
it's going to be a huge step forward (Score:2)
.... just as soon as we identify an actual use case for it.
Nice! (Score:2)
Will it be fusion powered in a private Mars colony using ISRU from asteroids for the multi-planet species? What a time to be alive!
Why is this news? (Score:3)
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He *may* actually have a good insight into when the problem his company specialized in addressing is going to be solved. But he has a strong motive to claim that it is, whether or not that's true.
It's now just an engineering problem... (Score:2)
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At that was classified, so I don't think people were saying commercial nuclear fusion power was right around the corner in the 50's. Heck they were not saying that in the '80s and there was some interesting research being done.
Cold Fusion Quantum AI Computers (Score:2)
I'm putting all my money into the next big thing, Cold Fusion Quantum AI computers using blockchain. They will work forever, solve all problems instantly, and make everyone billionaires. Step 3, profit!