Separating Truth From Hype From Quantum Supremacy to Quantum Advantage
From Quantum Supremacy to Quantum Entrepreneurship
Excerpts and salient points ~
+ Question is, where can this tech make the most headway in the near future? What are the areas that we should watch for quantum to create some game changing steps forward.
What’s key though is that the timing of the quantum revolution won’t be on the same scale we’re used to. Unlike the 40 years it’s taken from the advent of computing to where we are today, the same revolution may take just 5–10 years in quantum.
+ So… what next for quantum?
+ Question is, where can this tech make the most headway in the near future? What are the areas that we should watch for quantum to create some game changing steps forward.
+ Energy efficiency
+ What about other things? Energy for one. Fabien said this isn’t talked about enough: “It’s amazing to think a tiny chip did a task that would take a football field of classical computers to do”.
+ As demands on computing power continue to rise, energy will become more and more of a conversation we need to have. The fact that Google can achieve such a radically demanding calculation using such a comparatively tiny amount of energy may well be the real story we should focus on.
+ Faster calculations at scale for areas like chemistry
+ Even though quantum isn’t faster for everything, there are some things it excels at. And it happens that these things are really useful when it comes to chemistry and pharma, making them a prime target for quantum advancements according to Fabien.
+ According to Fabien, chemistry is a prime target. Chemistry and pharma need to understand concepts that are at their core routed in nature. Molecules and drug discovery are fundamentally a search for stuff in the natural world. As quantum is how nature works, quantum computing has a great advantage vs. normal computers when it comes to these problems.
+ Quantum as a processor — the QPU
+ For computing, Fabien also suggested that we think about a hybrid approach. We can use a quantum processor to augment a normal computer — batching out jobs to the quantum computer it’s suited at, and keeping the rest running as you would normally. It’s a very promising configuration, especially in chemistry, where one of the most promising algorithm uses this configuration.
+ Examples of this exist. Gaming uses Graphical Processing Units (GPU’s), specifically batching out jobs related to graphics to these units which they’re really good at, but keeping other bits they suck at in other areas.
+ Breakthroughs in Machine Learning and AI
+ For Iordanis, Machine Learning and quantum are natural friends. ML isn’t an exact science, it learns as it goes, so has noise baked in. That means it’s less hampered by the high error rate currently seen in quantum computing. The power of AI is outpacing the capability of computing capacity, so watch this space to see how the massive speeds quantum offers may well be the best friend of power hungry AI.
Source: M. Jonny Everett, From Quantum Supremacy to Quantum Entrepreneurship…
Content may have been edited for style and clarity.
