| I'm a software engineer at Rigetti, so I'll talk a little bit from that perspective. One thing we are really emphasizing is having a full stack of software to enable hybrid classical/quantum computation. We believe that leveraging current computing resources as much as possible in a quantum computation will be important for near-term algorithms. Quantum algorithms such as the quantum approximate optimization algorithm very naturally fit into this hybrid computing regime. There are lots of details about our quantum computing architecture which differ from the other players out there. There are different kinds of qubit-qubit interactions that we do compared to IBM. I will defer questions about these to other folks and our recently released white papers [0, 1, 2, 3]. From a company standpoint, our goal is to build the most powerful computer. Not anything else. We don't do ads. We don't build business machines. We build quantum computers and make them available with software. When you depend on it to survive, you definitely work a little bit harder and smarter to achieve your goals. [0] http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Demonstration_of_Universal_Par... [1] http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Parametrically-Activated_Entan... [2] http://www.rigetti.com/papers/Analytical_Modeling_of_Paramet... [3] (paywall) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7738703/ |