Submitted by upyourego t3_yrjipt in Futurology
Sorry - should have clarified it is a goal of a 4,000+ quantum computer from 2025 with the aim that three together will be 16,000 qubits.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/upyourego:
Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and vice president of IBM Quantum said 2023 is a major inflection point for quantum computing, the starting point when the quantum-centric supercomputer is first realised and scaling is enabled. He said that it does so by “combining quantum communication and computation to increase computational capacity”.
British startup Universal Quantum is taking a similar approach, developing multi-chip quantum computers for more rapid scaleup.
But it is still some time before we reach any real supremacy as a study by the University of Sussex found we'd need 13 million qubits to crack 256 bit encryption in a day.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yrjipt/ibm_says_its_future_is_in_quantumcentered/ivtwrbz/
I understand that to be an industry leader you kind of need to go in hard and early, but is QC still a solution without a problem? Or perhaps, the computing power hasn't reached "useful" level yet? This is in no way trying to downplay the potential future applications, but the article doesn't touch on what applications IBM is banking on here that would make them want to go all-in. Maybe there aren't any anticipated uses they are looking at and are still in the exploratory stage; I'm simply curious.
Watson seems to come to mind as a Solution in search of a Problem that IBM thought was going to be the focus and ended up being massively scaled back (granted, Watson is finding niche use and success, but it's not the breakthrough success IBM hyped up).
At a briefing with IBM I was told they have a large number of finance and pharmaceutical customers due to the ability quantum will have to carry out rapid calculations. They’ve also recently signed a deal with Vodafone for network analysis using quantum computing.
Obviously the real benefit isn’t here yet - it will take more qubits (hundreds of thousands) and better fidelity and error correction - but there are existing use cases. Some of these are algorithms for fraud detection running on IBM hardware.
Apparently there are significant wait times to use quantum hardware available via AWS
The ability to accurately model proteins without X-ray crystallography would be massive for the pharmaceutical industry. Being able to model a whole cell would be another lightyear leap. For drug development it would be absolutely revolutionary.
Quantum enhanced machine learning might give machine learning more depth and adaptability across many fields.
A few years ago they said their future was in Watson and now that's...not even a thing I think? If I had to bet I'd say their future is in mainframes.
Watson is the IBM AI platform - it’s a huge part of its offering
Heh. I was thinking if they cant do that math, I'm kinda skeptical about their quantum computing.
Well first application will be weapons then everything else
Quantum computers don't do math like you or I know, they do "fuzzy" math. It is based on probabilities, and it will usually choose the desired outcome. For example, if you or I add three with four, we will get seven. But if a quantum computer adds three with four, it will usually get about seven, sometimes eight, sometimes six.
I'd say there is a big difference between IBM's attempt to win the AI and their attempt to win Quantum. If you consider Watson, it really was primarily a software thing - there is no leapfrog innovation when it comes to hardware. This means IBM had to compete with other software companies and frankly - software never was in IBM's DNA. Software game is different than the hardware game. It requires different speed, different agility, different mindset and culture.
On the other developing a quantum computer is primarily a hardware innovation. And when it comes to hardware, especially if it is big, complex and expensive appliances now we are talking about something that IBM was good at for past 100 years.
So I believe IBM's chances are much higher to win Quantum then chances it had to win AI.
upyourego OP t1_ivtwrbz wrote
Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and vice president of IBM Quantum said 2023 is a major inflection point for quantum computing, the starting point when the quantum-centric supercomputer is first realised and scaling is enabled. He said that it does so by “combining quantum communication and computation to increase computational capacity”.
British startup Universal Quantum is taking a similar approach, developing multi-chip quantum computers for more rapid scaleup.
But it is still some time before we reach any real supremacy as a study by the University of Sussex found we'd need 13 million qubits to crack 256 bit encryption in a day.