[freetonik]

I worked at a quantum computing company that builds superconducting QC chips (so, not really applicable to one of the “bombshells” from the article). My team was designing the software stack which allows to control the QC, run quantum jobs/algorithms, and calibrate the parameters.

I’ve made two attempts to explain the work we’ve been doing and to explain the current realistic state of the industry:

1. A talk at PyCon: https://youtu.be/tT1YLP5T71Y

2. A free ebook “ Quantum Computing For Software Engineers” https://leanpub.com/quantum-computing-for-software-engineers

The company I left a few months ago is planning its IPO this year. Like almost all other quantum companies, it’s gonna be a SPAC merger, not a pure IPO. Those traded companies mentioned in the other comments are mostly SPACs as well.

[ProllyInfamous]

Thank you for posting/sharing.

My mid-sized US city (Chattanooga) has recently announced a partnership with Vanderbilt and EPB (local govt-owned fiber ISP) which creates a Quantum Computing Research Facility [$,$$$,$$$,$$$] [1].

As locals are covering this news, I keep having this thought that nobody (perhaps less than a few?) even knows what those words mean (certainly not me). You speak confidently and clearly enough that I'm incline to believe it's kind of real.

So thanks for sharing your P[0]V with this dumbass (former data center) electrician (me). All the "Quantum"-phrasing represents to me is more local job opportunities.

>>@3m27s: "Quantum computing is basically trying to treat some isolated piece of the universe to behave slightly less randomly, for a very brief timeframe, so that it is useful to you when you try to solve some problem."

>>@20m: [simple flow-chart of interacting with Quantum Processing Unit]

>>@final.words: [paraphrasing] "Right now you buy a quantum computer simply to research quantum computers. Ours is $14MM"

>>@final.meme: <https://i.imgur.com/WKaN3mL.png> [2]

>>Q&A further listening recommendation: <https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/05/13/275-...>

>>"If you learn the examples on <https://quantum.country> you will be among top 1% of QC newhires."

[0] that quantum computing is "kind of real", which is how it always feels when being-described

[1] <https://www.vanderbilt.edu/chancellor/initiatives-and-outrea...>

[2] explain yourself (you really think you can include this slide in your presentation and then not talk about its implication(s)?!)

[freetonik]

The meme refers to the notion where an observation (i.e. interaction) collapses the wave function to a single value. As in, prior to observation, a system in a quantum superposition is said to be "in multiple states at the same time", and after the obsevation only one state exists, while all other possibilities are gone (or exist in other worlds, according to one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics [0]).

So, in that meme, the guy looks at one girl (the observed state) and "ignores" all other girls (all other possible states).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

[ProllyInfamous]

I'm about 20 minutes into:

>>https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/05/13/275-...

Which was recommended from the top_commenter's link to his own professional QPU programming presentation. I remain interested in learning more about this pure magic.

Ya'lls words both seem to represent worlds which I doubt even more words could help me into ever understanding(s).

I definitely understand being "in multiple states at the same time" — — —

[looshch]

> I worked at a quantum computing company

the moment i read it i immediately thought about Rakhim, then i checked your username and indeed it was you. Fun!

[sigmoid10]

If they're going public I imagine they already sell some kind of QC chips. But, like, who buys them? Yesterday there was a new paper [1] that shows how Shor's algorithm could break realistic encryptions with as little as 10,000 qubits (instead of millions), but as far as I know quantum hardware is still orders of magnitude below even that target. So how big can the market actually be? Shipping to universities or other QC companies for playing around with some actual hardware is nice and all, but in the end someone will be left holding the bag. There is zero profit to be made at the end of the chain.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2603.28627v1

[freetonik]

>There is zero profit to be made at the end of the chain.

Think of all the "sales" that comprise such things as space missions (ones without immediate real-world use) or large hadron collider. Or any other large, expensive, long scientific project. If you measure the outcome purely in money within decades, these things can be said to be zero or negative profit.

How much profit was at the end of the chain of the current Artemis lunar mission? Well, zero or negative, but lots of companies and people up the chain made meaningful progress and made a living. Quantum computing is just like that in my opinion.

The biggest problem in my eyes is the "game" of commercialization. This technology is in early research phase, but it's so expensive and not immediately game-changing that the public funding was never enough. So, companies started to play the "we sell products" and "we do IPO" games, which IMO doesn't make sense.

[sigmoid10]

I don't think any of your comparisons are accurate. Artemis may be a publicity stunt and a jobs program by congress, but the companies are in it for the long term mission of commercializing space. And SpaceX has clearly shown there's already a lot of money to be made with commercial space programs.

The LHC/CERN on the other hand is officially a pure science project, fully funded by public institutions. Their goal is not to go IPO and raise money for more experiments from some vague promise of potential future commercial applications, even though they probably exist.

[whattheheckheck]

Profit is serves as a decentralized coordination for the allocation of scarce resources of the infinite number of commodities and combinatorics of products and services that exist in the world.

Have you read Basic Economics by Sowell?

[regularfry]

At this point my bet is that the breakthrough isn't going to be qbits per chip, it's going to be entanglements-per-second in quantum networking. If you could string together simpler processors in a cluster at anything approaching interesting scales then all of a sudden the orders of magnitude become a lot less constrained and it's just a money problem.

[freetonik]

Quantum networking is a lesser problem than changing the state and keeping intact long enough. You can already move quantum state over fiber optics pretty reliably, so transport exists, but what then? You need to put the qubits of the connected chip into the corresponding state (which takes time), and do it many times, and all that time is an overhead.

Superconducting QCs are fast, but the state degrades incredibly quickly, so you only have a fraction of a second (maybe a millisecond at best, currently) until the entire state is garbage. Some other modalities like trapped ion are the opposite: state can live long, but each operation is orders of magnitude slower.

[freetonik]

During my 3.7 years at the company, we had dozens of sales of full-stack quantum computers, chips + cryostat + control electronics + software, ranging from 5 to ~100 physical qubits. Naturally, the buyers are mostly research institutions and univercities who need a real quantum computer to do research on quantum computation and simulation (to a lesser degree with the superconducting technology, though).

(Often the research is done purely within clasically-simulated quantum computers, i.e. virtual QCs, but to verify and make the research publishable they need to run at least partial sub-problems on a real chip.)

Another, smaller, market is HPC centers. They buy and install quantum computers into existing HPC infrastructure because a) they have a few customers who need it (sometimes those same research institutions/universities), and b) they need to solve the integration problem for the future when QCs are actually used for real-world problems and big customers come to HPCs to run both classical and quantum high-performance jobs.

Here is an excerpt from my book I linked above, just to give a bit more context:

---

Since quantum computers are essentially analog devices that allow you to control, in a limited fashion, a set of quantum objects, you can do some research in foundational quantum physics. [...] Still, given the current state of the industry, classical computers outperform most quantum systems. But the research applied to smaller QCs can be scaled once the hardware scales.

Of course, the main area is quantum computing itself. From abstract, mathematical notions of algorithms to very low-level questions of calibration, many universities and research organizations are eager to have a quantum computer available to prove their theories and discover new properties. Commercial companies that deal with material science, battery technology, agriculture, and chemistry are buying quantum computers (or at least buying access to one) because they want to be ready if and when truly large-scale QCs become available. [...]

And finally, integration research. This is the least known and least discussed topic in the industry but is very important. Its significance is one of the motivations for writing this book. Quantum computers, being research tools, are not normal products. They are driven by software, like anything else, but this software changes rapidly and is rarely written with long-term evolution in mind. If you buy a quantum computer today, chances are your code will not work on any other quantum computer, or even on the next iteration of the same machine. At the same time, researchers often need to work with multiple types of machines simultaneously, and HPC (high-performance computing) centers, i.e. supercomputing data centers, want to integrate quantum computers into their existing infrastructure and provide a "quantum compute" service to their users.

[pyuser583]

Does quantum have any money making prospects?

Breaking encryption is illegal. Making encryption is difficult to profit from.

Other than that, what’s the value add?

[pseudohadamard]

Scaring people, then selling them stuff that you claim will deal with the scare. It's practically a license to print money.

[notpublic]

Excellent talk!