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The quantum computing bubble

ft.com

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Re: The quantum computing bubble

#61

Post by mdorazio »

b112 wrote: post #54
nosianu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 no…

You need to get your information from places other than Wikipedia. The vacuum tube was invented in 1904 and entered mass production by RCA in 1920 after several rounds of improvements. D-Wave started demonstrating its QC product in 2009 and here we are 13 years later with basically nothing. Are you going to tell us that QC will be commercially viable in three years?

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#62

Post by sfpotter »

aqme28 wrote: post #58
sfpotter wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The simple reason for this is that despite years of effort nobody has yet come close to building a quantum machine that is actually capable of solving practical problems. The current devices are so error-prone that any information one tries to process with them will almost instantly degenerate into noise. The problem only grows worse if the computer is scaled up (ie, the number of “qubits” increased)."

+ 5 subsequent paragraphs

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#63

Post by bottled_poe »

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…

Ah, the quantum ROI, where we affect the return by attempting to measure it.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#64

Post by krastanov »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #55
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.

1. Seems a bit unfair to say it has been developed since the 80's. In 80's a couple of people (e.g. Feynman) noticed that if you have a quantum simulator, you can simulate chemistry in a way that a classical computer is seemingly incapable of. But the transmon (one of the first possibly viable implementations of a qubit) was not developed until the 00's and complete control of some of these systems (e.g. transmon coupled to an oscillator, in order to make a memory) was not demonstrated until the 2010's. Life-times of quantum memories have also been growing exponentially for more than a decade (a trend that started in the 00's).

2. It is worth mentioning that by the standards of your comment, the time between conceiving of a classical computer (Babbage) and a scalable electronic computer (ENIAC and family) was about a century.

3. While ultimately there might be a "quantum winter" in the next few years because we (I work in the field) overpromised, this would not be the first time a tech that ultimately works gets disregarded for a decade or two because of mismanaging expectations (e.g. Liquid Crystal displays or neural networks, which were both developed for many decades before being commercially viable).

EDIT: And yes, there are some startups with misleadingly general pitches.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#66

Post by krastanov »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #35
dr_dshiv wrote: post #25

I have a fair amount of experience in this space. It’s like, at a vacuum tube era, at best. There is a definite opportunity for advancement, but it is still extremely early. We are building user interfaces that make it easier to “play around” with quantum computing phenomena—especially with music and art—with the idea that our aesthetic sensibilities may help drive discovery.

> 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.

I think the comparison is still reasonable: while we do not have scalable quantum computers, the technologies developed for them have actually seen a lot of use: squeezed light and non-classical light, color centers, Josephson junctions, nonlinear-optics at the single-photon level, to name a few "terms of art" that should be google-able, are crucial for precision sensing and telecom.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#68

Post by DubiousPusher »

mdorazio wrote: post #61
b112 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

You need to get your information from places other than Wikipedia. The vacuum tube was invented in 1904 and entered mass production by RCA in 1920 after several rounds of improvements. D-Wave started demonstrating its QC product in 2009 and here we are 13 years later with basically nothing. Are you going to tell us that QC will be commercially viable in three years?

It's honestly just a really bad analogy. Evacuated tubes were not pursued en-masse as an end unto themselves the way quantum computing is being pursued. Their development was as a side fascination for a handful of researchers or they were advanced because they were directly applicable to some goal of a researcher with maybe some mild tweaking. They were not a moonshot and they developed along similar lines as most useful "inventions" of today.

Quantum computing isn't even really comparable to ENIAC. Because the fundamental parts of ENIAC were known to be capable of doing what was required before the machine was built. There were analogus precursors to basically all the parts of the machine. The engineering challenges came with integration and at scale but fundamentally there wasn't a question of whether it could be done or not. We can't say the same yet of quantum computing.

IMO, quantum computing is more like space travel ca. the 1950s. We've got a lot of information: rockets look promising, we've learned a lot about the environment pilots will need to operate in up there, etc but no one really knows how far this can go and certainly we can't say if it will ever be profitable.

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#69

Post by chrisweekly »

ptero wrote: post #56
acomjean wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

+1 Insightful.

Also, in the spirit of helpfulness, "passed over" is the wrong turn of phrase as used here; it implies "declined or rejected" (as in, being passed over for a promotion at work). I think "surpassed" or "leap-frogged" are closer to your intended meaning. HTH! :)

Re: The quantum computing bubble

#70

Post by zmgsabst »

krastanov wrote: post #64
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. Seems a bit unfair to say it has been developed since the 80's. In 80's a couple of people (e.g. Feynman) noticed that if you have a quantum simulator, you can simulate chemistry in a way that a classical computer is seemingly incapable of. But the transmon (one of the first possibly viable implementations of a qubit) was not developed until the 00's and complete control of some of these systems (e.g. transmon cou…

To elaborate on the NN example:

The perceptron was developed in 1940s and only became useful in the 2000-2010 range. So 60-70 years of development time.

If we take 50 years as a baseline (faster than historic examples; but underestimating), we’d expect a quantum computer some time in the 2030s.

Is anyone here hard objecting to QC in the 2030-2040 range?

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