I was officially wrong about quantum computers and I don't understand what's going on anymore. Two years ago, I said quantum computing hype will falter in 2024. What's happened instead is exactly the opposite.
I have a nagging feeling there's something going on that we don't know about. Today, I want to explain why I'm so pessimistic about quantum computing and what's happening against all reason. Quantum computers have been praised as the next big thing in computing, new technology that could vastly speed up certain types of computations by exploiting the peculiar logic of quantum physics.
This sounds great, and it is greater still. There are now multiple companies which say they're ready to mass-roduce quantum computers. The newest arrival is the UK company Quantum Mission which says they have the first full stack quantum computer that scalable technology with the ability to be mass- prodduced.
By this they mean that they have the hardware with a software package and a user interface. They work with superconducting circuits and say they can scale this to a million cubits, which is a rough estimate for when quantum computers are expected to become commercially relevant. This sounds super impressive, doesn't it?
They are the first to claim they can move to mass production of quantum computers. The company Sai Quantum, which works with photons as cubits, said already last year they are building a factory. The Chinese are building a factory for quantum computers, too.
And the Japanese company Fujitsu just announced out of the blue that they can build a quantum computer with 250 logical cubits. Well, the marketing departments have definitely achieved quantum advantage. But there is a little problem with these reports.
It's that the press releases don't agree with reality. The best understood and studied approach today to quantum computing is and remains superconducting circuits. Those are what IBM, Google, Amazon and many others work with.
The manipulation and readout of these cubits can now be done with excellent precision and low error. We've seen demonstrations of this up to roughly 100 cubits or so. The problem becomes apparent if you look at those quantum computers.
These chandelier like things are the cooling system and the noise buffer. These cubits work at temperatures of some millichelvin. And the problem is now that you can't put arbitrarily many cubits in one cooling device.
It's not so much the size that's the difficulty. It's that the more cubits you have that you need to manipulate, the more heat that'll produce. This is an issue no one likes to really talk about.
I don't have exact numbers, but by my rough estimate, somewhere at around 1,000 cubits or so, you have a problem. This is almost certainly why IBM announced a few years back they'll be building the world's largest super fridge. But we haven't heard anything of this since.
To scale up these devices, therefore, they must connect multiple cooling systems and that'll explode the error rate. So the problem is not mass- prodducing the cubits or the devices. The problem is to mass-roduce devices that actually work.
These headlines are just crazy. It's like saying, "Hey, we can mass-roduce spaceships. It's just that they don't fly.
The company site quantum works with photons, but from them we basically haven't seen any documentation of what they can do. Do they have some secret recipe that'll make it work? Maybe.
You see, this is the problem here. It's very well possible that there is something going on here that isn't in the public domain. And now look at this paper.
These are the stocks of publicly traded quantum computing companies. INQ, Reetti, D-Wave. They all made the most amazing gains in the past months.
Black Rockck even wants to offer a quantum computing EFT now. But why? The US government announced they'll invest into quantum tech.
So did JP Morgan and that certainly contributed to some optimism. But other than that, we've just seen nonsense claims like this headline from IBM that they can now do quantum enabled algorithmic trading. As usual with these headlines, the quantum part isn't actually necessary.
It just makes things more difficult. The computer scientist Scott Aronson put it like this. to critique this paper is not quite shooting fish in a barrel because the fish are already dead before we've reached the end of the abstract.
There's headlines like this basically every week. Quantum computers help train scheduling. Quantum computers make home screener.
Quantum computers discover proteins. Quantum computers evidently can do everything except produce money because none of these companies is even remotely profitable. It is possible that there's been some technological breakthrough that's highly confidential which explains all this.
The other possible explanation is that the excitement is driven by government investment especially by the US military which is very concerned the Chinese will beat them. And this bubble is also almost certainly driven by scientists who do nothing to clear up all the misconceptions that people have about quantum computers. So the bad news is that quantum computing hype is not anywhere close to faltering.
The good news is I still have a job calling it out. Yes, I do read a lot of news and know that chat bots still aren't any good at writing my scripts. But what does help me a lot is Ground News.
Ground News is a news platform that collects and summarizes news which has been published all over the world. Not only do they collect all articles on the same story in one place and give you a quick summary, they also give you a lot of extra information that you don't find in the standard media. A peculiar example I saw the other day is this story about how North America was once busily populated by dinosaurs.
This basically wasn't covered on the political right. This tells you a lot about echo chambers, doesn't it? Ground news also gives you a factuality rating for each news item.
tells you who owns the media outlets and shows you where the news has appeared. Ground News also has this great feature called blind spot. This tells you which news has been almost exclusively covered only by one side of the political spectrum.
And of course, I have a special offer for you. That's a 40% discount on the Vantage plan, which gives you access to all their features. All you need to do is use my link ground.
/zina or use the QR code. So go and check this out. Thanks for watching.
See you tomorrow.
