[tombert]

Here's hoping that my stock for D-Wave ends up being worth something.

Quantum computing seems super cool, but I've been a little skeptical of it actually ever yielding anything useful. I would love to be wrong, it seems neat, and I have read through a few books on the subject and played with simulators, so I'm not completely talking out of my ass here, but quantum as a whole has kind of felt like vaporware to me.

As I said, I have stock in D-Wave, obviously it would be in my best interest for quantum to end up as cool as it seems.

[bawolff]

D-Wave is not making the type of quantum computers these breakthroughs would apply to, even if scaled up, as far as i know.

[pathOf_aFineMan]

They recently bought a more gate based quantum computing company [1]

[1] https://www.dwavequantum.com/company/newsroom/press-release/...

[esseph]

You can rent Quantum computing time from IBM cloud today:

https://www.ibm.com/quantum/products

https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/en/guides/plans-overview

I have NOT used it, but the idea is interesting.

[t312227]

hello,

as always: imho (!)

i've used the ibm quantum platform together with python/qiskit during my last project - which was something like: simulate quantum-networks on "real" quantum-computers...

ibm's support, introductions / documentation anbd usability of the platform is really great.

idk ... not comparable / much better than most of the quantum-computing hardware startups i know / looked at. of course, its easy if you have "deep pockets" like ibm does ... ;))

ok, back to the quantum platform:

it had a free-tier on the "old" quantum-platform - until july 2025: 10 minutes of compute on a set of machines - back then up to 127 qubits - per month ... no identification necessary / just an email-address.

sadly this "very generous" free-tier was killed of during the transition to the all new "quantum cloud platform" during spring/summer 2025 ...

and it really works like a charm :)

just my 0.02€

[AlexCoventry]

You can rent it, but it's basically worthless at this stage.

[pathOf_aFineMan]

there's still a long road to commercial applications but today's hardware is simulating quantum systems beyond the scale of classical methods, for example [1]; an interesting line of work opposite to this can be found in those who improve classical methods towards such examples [2], but these are only developed because of the existing quantum hardware

Really though, today's IBM hardware is good fun to play with, eg for generating moderately large GHZ states

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26845 [2]https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14887

[cbm-vic-20]

Is there anything you can do on a rented QC that you can't do cheaper on a simulated QC on a "classical" CPU/GPU today?

[t312227]

hello,

yes ... especially if you want to execute quantum-circuits which use a lot of qubits.

why!? one approach of the simulation of quantum-computers rely on the so called "state vector" of the machine, and its memory-usage grows exponentially.

for example qiskit AER

* https://qiskit.github.io/qiskit-aer/stubs/qiskit_aer.Stateve...

just as an example:

for 32 qubits, the simulator needs 64 GB RAM

=?> double the RAM for each additional qubit

so: for 36 qubits, the simulator needs 1 TB RAM

:)

so it gets pretty "costly" to do simulations rather quickly ...

just my 0.02€

[AlanYx]

No. They're a decent playground for prototyping hybrid algorithms but even that is limited. No one has yet published a hybrid algorithm on a rentable QC provider that has better benchmark performance than a modern CPU/GPU implementation.

[crispyambulance]

I got some too. Obviously the principles behind quantum computing are perfectly sound. It's just those pesky engineering obstacles.

One of the companies around today or in the near future will be the one who makes it work at a practical scale. It will have enormous impact, but I think it will be a slow-burn kind of thing as making effective use of quantum computers will take a long time to evolve, IMHO.

Unfortunately, Google and IBM are also working on this stuff and they have deep pockets. They might do it, but even if they don't they may very well decide to acquire whoever does.

These stocks (IONQ, RGTI, QBTS, XNDU) are a sort of thinking-man's LOTTO ticket which will have its numbers called anytime within the next 5 to 20 years (probably closer to 20). I think they're worthwhile to hold in affordable quantities to see what happens. It might hit big, or it might fizzle out for a variety of reasons. There will also be some hype-driven market sugar-rushes along the way that are an opportunity to rake in a modest profit. This has happened already with IONQ, RGTI and QBTS earlier this year. It will certainly happen again when the patagonia-vest people get jazzed about something.

[eru]

You might benefit from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund

[tombert]

Like 95% of my investing money ends up going to fairly-low-risk ETFs like VOO or VTI, not too different than from an index fund.

Still, that last five percent is more or less my gambling money. I put it into individual stocks with the hope they get huge. Sometimes it works out well, like when I bought $700 of Nvidia in 2022. Sometimes it goes badly, like when I bought a bunch of Sears stock with the hope they'd bounce back.

I think I'm still technically "up" with my gambling money, though it's in the budget of "stuff I'd be ok going to zero".

[eru]

Well, if it comes out of your gambling budget and you treat it as entertainment, then there's nothing wrong with that. At least the expected average payout is way better most other forms of gambling.

[crispyambulance]

I do, sport, like everybody else.