Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

kompootor t1_j9or1oo wrote

Google's blog post on this paper, which gets into more technical details and also explains their development timeline. It's probably required reading and should be stickied.

With that background, from OP's article:

>he thinks that at this stage “we can confidently promise a commercial value” for quantum computers.

Really? You got that from handling one scalability problem, so now it will have commercial value. Really?

According to their timeline they still need to scale up by 4 orders of magnitude (and note this error correction solution itself requires an additional multiplier to the number of qubits), with still no way to make even preserving entanglement not scale in difficulty with each qubit. That's in addition to the inability to predict the inevitable new tiers of problems you'll run into when your viability timeline requires scaling, again, on the order of 10,000x. And when you talk commercialization beyond a fad, you still need to find a convincing use case beyond uneconomical-for-daily-use cryptography and being a physics model of... itself.

This is a huge achievement. I like QC a lot. But there's a lot of hype, fads, BS, and fraud out there, and it's only going to get worse. And at the risk of sounding haughty, other science megaprojects learned (after a couple major f-ups) how to keep disciplined and stay quiet until their claims/projections were either substantive or they needed help. (In this case the project's claim is fine, but the director's projection is not.)

1

kompootor t1_j9oskl1 wrote

And this is not an isolated problem. I saw a talk by IBM recently that also said they had something in QC that was commercially viable, but after a few questions it was clear they had nothing even close to a realistic (if any) idea for what their business model would look like -- it was like it hadn't even occurred to them to consider that kind of thing before claiming something was commercially viable.

1

symmetricalboy t1_j9phi5m wrote

I'm aroused by your passion.

1

kompootor t1_j9puchn wrote

QC can't be developed past a fizzled-out tinker-toy if there's nobody willing to pay for it (there's a finite amount of VC out there, and they all want to believe there'll be returns before they die). There's nobody to pay for it if there's no viable commercial market. There's no viable commercial market if they can't even conceive of a business model.

(The government would fund QC for cryptography, sure, but meeting those requirements is many orders easier and cheaper than getting a generalized QC of the kind everyone's excited about.)

1