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The quantum computing bubble

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Re: The quantum computing bubble

#51

Post by acomjean »

cerol wrote: post #39

This is how I think about it. It's insurance money. If you're a manager of a big company like IBM, Microsoft or Google, you have to align your current product portfolio and future portfolio in such a way that shows your investor that your company will keep growing, even if your current products are stagnant. You can surely say Quantum computing won't do much in next 5 years. But what about 10 years? 20 years? 30 year…

I mean these companies have Research and Development divisions. I was at IBM at the turn of the century when they spent 6 billion dollars on research. One of the pushes was to get research to focus on things they could market and make money with.

But the big research plays (bell labs, xerox parc) seem to get less and less funding if they exist at all. A lot of the inventions of those places were monitized outside those companies. IBM had a chip fab in the research building… long spun of was that business.

At the turn of the century IBM was researching quantum computing, but as I was leaving selling services was IBMs big push.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#52

Post by nosianu »

b112 wrote: post #38
oldgradstudent wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s like, at a vacuum tube era, at best. How is it even remotely close? Vacuum tubes were a thriving industry, producing many groundbreaking products and services.

Yet before that stage, they were a new tech, no one even had ideas of how to use. So far, quantum computing is used in labs, not for any real useful purpose.

> Yet before that stage, they were a new tech

As far as I know - and we still had some tube radios at home when I grew up - they were used pretty much right away. For radios, and replacing mechanical relay switches, over which there obvious advantage was that since the tubes were not mechanical they would last longer, especially important in systems with lots of them.

So I'm not completely sure and somebody with definite knowledge should chime in, but I think they were not some "we have no idea what to do with this" but where useful from early on, as soon as the manufacturing method was solid. They were used for "normal" electronics well before they were used for the early computers. Even though Google search - which I just tried - also seems to have a bias and mostly associate those vacuum tubes with computers and forget all about the many other uses. It was the predecessor of diodes and transistors in addition to being better than mechanical relays.

https://www.engineering.com/story/vacuum-tubes-the-world-bef...

https://www.nps.gov/features/safr/feat0001/virtualships/vrmo...

(just one of the earliest commercial use cases as example for how short the period was between invention and wide-spread use)

> Dr. Lee deForest invented the vacuum tube in 1906. His tube, which he called the "audion," was first developed as a detector of radio waves and was quickly adopted by shipboard operators. Later experimentation, by deForest and others, showed the ability of the vacuum tube to generate radio signals with far greater precision than earlier systems. By 1914 the essentials of tube-based transmitters had been worked out.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#53

Post by sfpotter »

aqme28 wrote: post #48

I don't understand this argument at all. Of course it isn't making money yet-- that's because it's an early technology that is still being researched. Sure it might never mature, but it seems crazy to call it a "bubble" or to analyze it based on current sales figures.

That wasn't the argument made in the article. There are reasons to believe that the technology is fundamentally unsound, and will never be able to scale or make money.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#54

Post by b112 »

nosianu wrote: post #52
b112 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet before that stage, they were a new tech, no one even had ideas of how to use. So far, quantum computing is used in labs, not for any real useful purpose.

> Yet before that stage, they were a new tech As far as I know - and we still had some tube radios at home when I grew up - they were used pretty much right away. For radios, and replacing mechanical relay switches, over which there obvious advantage was that since the tubes were not mechanical they would last longer, especially important in systems with lots of them. So I'm not completely sure and somebody with defi…

Sure, tube based transmitters had been, in a lab, "worked out". But we're talking about 20 years before commercial use really happened:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#The_first_vac...

Radio existed (as you say) before the tube, but it took time to get the tube into real-world use. I guess this is somewhat like computing ; computing has existed in many forms, mechanical through to IC designs we have now.

But quantum? It's in a lab, and real-world applications are being worked out.

Paralleling back to radio again, people knew tubes would be useful, but it took 20+ years to make them mass producible, and make tubes usable, and redesign radios to use them. This, to me, sounds like quantum computing.

We can think of things I suppose to use them for (perhaps I was hasty on this point in my prior post), but we aren't there yet. And really, looking at the tube -- did anyone think they'd be used to make massive computers even?

I bet quantum computing will be the same way -- uses we're not aware of now.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#55

Post by Cthulhu_ »

aqme28 wrote: post #48

I don't understand this argument at all. Of course it isn't making money yet-- that's because it's an early technology that is still being researched. Sure it might never mature, but it seems crazy to call it a "bubble" or to analyze it based on current sales figures.

It's not actually early technology, it's been developed since the 80's. And if the underlying theories are unsound - if it doesn't even work in theory - then putting more money in won't make it magically viable.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#56

Post by ptero »

acomjean wrote: post #51
cerol wrote: post #39

This is how I think about it. It's insurance money. If you're a manager of a big company like IBM, Microsoft or Google, you have to align your current product portfolio and future portfolio in such a way that shows your investor that your company will keep growing, even if your current products are stagnant. You can surely say Quantum computing won't do much in next 5 years. But what about 10 years? 20 years? 30 year…

I mean these companies have Research and Development divisions. I was at IBM at the turn of the century when they spent 6 billion dollars on research. One of the pushes was to get research to focus on things they could market and make money with. But the big research plays (bell labs, xerox parc) seem to get less and less funding if they exist at all. A lot of the inventions of those places were monitized outside tho…

It is not the amount of funding, it is the allocation that doomed R&D at big companies.

Forty years ago they were the best game in town for applied research (defining applied as, on success, having a fast track to commercialization). Later it became similar to the university research: on success, you write some articles, get company wows, but business people have no idea where to stick it and half heartedly throw a few applications at it to see if any stick. Most don't (e.g., deep blue, watson).

At this point large company R&D centers got passed over (by a lot) by VC- funded applied research and saw a (IMO well deserved) drop of funding.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#58

Post by aqme28 »

sfpotter wrote: post #53
aqme28 wrote: post #48

I don't understand this argument at all. Of course it isn't making money yet-- that's because it's an early technology that is still being researched. Sure it might never mature, but it seems crazy to call it a "bubble" or to analyze it based on current sales figures.

That wasn't the argument made in the article. There are reasons to believe that the technology is fundamentally unsound, and will never be able to scale or make money.

It wasn't? The article leads with that argument.

"The reality is that none of these companies — or any other quantum computing firm, for that matter — are actually earning any real money."

I don't see any argument that the technology is fundamentally unsound or doesn't scale, even though that's an argument I'm pretty amenable to.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#59

Post by WhitneyLand »

All bubbles are not equal in risk, folly, or long term sustainability.

In the case of the Internet Bubble stocks were down 78%, but it was not hard to do well in the end given diversification and a long enough horizon.

In the case of the Dutch Tulip bubble there was no good ending for anyone except those who got out early.

Some bubbles like NFTs generate strong opinions but have yet to have final judgment from history.

I think the quantum computing bubble is different than all three, but closer to the Internet than to Tulips. In which case the conventional strategy would be to diversify and expect a long time horizon.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#60

Post by posterboy »

aqme28 wrote: post #48

I don't understand this argument at all. Of course it isn't making money yet-- that's because it's an early technology that is still being researched. Sure it might never mature, but it seems crazy to call it a "bubble" or to analyze it based on current sales figures.

If the output side is saturated with work load but the input side keeps growing to blow up without significantly changing the output, or at worst affecting it negatively (quantum blockchain buzzword bingo), it may be fair to speak of a bubble.
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