Quantum computers use the natural
world to produce machines
with staggeringly powerful
processing potential.
I think it's gonna be
the most important computing
technology of this century, which
we are really just about
one fifth into.
We could use quantum computers
to simulate molecules, to
build new drugs and new
materials and to solve problems
plaguing physicists
for decades.
Wall Street could use them
to optimize portfolios, simulate
economic forecasts and for
complex risk analysis.
Quantum computing could also
help scientists speed up
discoveries in adjacent fields
like machine learning and
artificial intelligence.
Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft,
plus a host of smaller
companies such as Rigetti and
D-Wave, are all betting big
on Quantum. If you were a
billionaire, how many of your
billion would you give over for
an extra 10 years of life?
There are some simply
astonishing financial opportunities
in quantum computing. This is
why there's so much interest.
Even though it's so
far down the road.
But nothing is ever
a sure thing.
And dealing with the quirky
nature of quantum physics
creates some big hurdles
for this nascent technology.
From the very beginning, it
was understood that building a
useful quantum computer was going
to be a staggeringly hard
engineering problem if it was
even possible at all.
And there were even distinguished
physicists in the 90s who
said this will never work.
Is Quantum truly the next big
thing in computing, or is it
destined to become something
more like nuclear fusion?
Destined to always be the
technology of the future, never
the present. In October 2019,
Google made a big
announcement. Google said it
had achieved quantum
supremacy. That's the moment
when quantum computers can
beat out the world's
most powerful supercomputers for
certain tasks.
They have demonstrated with a
quantum computer that it can
perform a computation
in seconds.
What would take the
world's fastest supercomputer?
Years, thousands of years to
do that same calculation.
And in the field, this is
known as quantum supremacy and
it's a really
important milestone.
Google used a 53 qubit
processor named Sycamore to complete
the computation, a
completely arbitrary mathematical
problem with no
real world application.
The Google Quantum computer spit out
an answer in about 200
seconds. It would have taken
the world's fastest computer
around 10000 years to come up
with a solution, according to
Google scientists.
With that, Google claimed it had
won the race to quantum
supremacy. But IBM had an
issue with the findings.
Yes, IBM, the storied tech
company that helped usher in
giant mainframes and
personal computing.
It's a major player
in quantum computing.
IBM said one of its
massive supercomputer networks, this
one at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratories in Tennessee,
could simulate a quantum
computer and theoretically solve
the same problem in a matter
of days, not the 10000 years
that Google had claimed. Either
way, it was a huge
milestone for quantum computers,
and Silicon Valley is
taking notice. Venture capital
investors are pouring
hundreds of millions of
dollars into quantum computing
startups, even though practical
applications are years or
even decades away by 2019.
Private investors have backed
at least 52 quantum
technology companies around the
world since 2012, according
to an analysis by nature.
Many of them were spun
out of research teams at
universities in 2017 and 2018.
Companies received at least $450
million in private funding
more than four times the
funding from the previous two
years. That's nowhere near the
amount of funding going into
a field like
artificial intelligence.
About $9.3
billion with a venture capital
money poured into AI firms
in 2018. But the growth
in quantum computing funding is
happening quickly for an
industry without a real
application. Yet it is not easy
to figure out how to
actually use a quantum computer
to do something useful.
So nature gives you this very,
very bizarre hammer in the
form of these this interference
effect among all of these
amplitudes. Right.
And it's up to us as
quantum computer scientists to figure
out what nails that
hammer can hit.
That's leading to some backlash
against the hype and
concern that quantum computing could
soon become a bubble
and then dry up just
as fast if progress stalls.
Quantum computers are
also notoriously fickle.
They need tightly controlled
environments to operate in.
Changes in nearby temperatures
and electromagnetic waves
can cause them to mess up.
And then there's the temperature
of the quantum chips
themselves. They need to be
kept at temperatures colder
than interstellar space, close
to absolute zero.
One of the central tenets
of quantum physics is called
superposition. That means a
subatomic particle like an
electron can exist in two
different states at the same
time. It was and still is
super hard for normal computers
to simulate quantum mechanics
because of superposition.
No, it was only in the
early eighties that a few
physicists, such as Richard
Feynman had the amazing
suggestion that if nature is
giving us that computational
lemon, well, why not
make it into lemonade?
You've probably heard or read
this explanation of how a
quantum computer works.
Regular or classical computers
run on bits.
Bits can either be a
1 or a zero.
Quantum computers, on the other
hand, run on quantum bits
or cubits. Cubits can be either 1
or zero or both or a
combination of the two
at the same time.
That's not wrong per say,
but it only scratches the
surface. According to Scott
Aaronson, who teaches computer
science and quantum computing at
the University of Texas in
Austin. We asked him to
explain how quantum computing
actually works. Well, let
me start with this.
You never hear your weather
forecaster say we know there's
a negative 30 percent
chance of rain tomorrow.
Right. That would just
be non-sense, right?
Did the chance of something
happening, as always, between 0
percent and 100 percent.
But now quantum mechanics is
based on numbers called
amplitudes. Amplitudes can be
positive or negative.
In fact, they can even
be complex numbers involving the
square root of negative one.
So so a qubit is a bit
that has an amplitude for being zero
and another amplitude
for being one.
The goal for quantum computers
is to make sure the
amplitudes leading to wrong answers
cancel each other out.
And it scientists reading the
output of the quantum
computers are left with amplitudes
leading to the right
answer of whatever problem
they're trying to solve.
So what does a quantum computer
look like in the real
world? The quantum computers developed
by companies such as
Google, IBM and Rigetti were
all made using a process
called superconducting
And this is where you have a
chip the size of an ordinary
computer chip and you have little
coils of wire in the
chip, you know, which are
actually quite enormous by the
standards of cubits.
There are, you know, nearly big
enough to see with the
naked eye. But you can have
two different quantum states of
current that are flowing
through these coils that
correspond to a zero or a one.
And of course, you can also
have super positions of the
two. Now the coil can
interact with each other via
something called
Josef's injunctions.
So they're laid out in roughly
a rectangular array and the
nearby ones can talk to
each other and thereby generate
these very complicated states,
what we call entangled
states, which is one of
the essentials of quantum computing
and the way that the cubists
interact with each other is
fully programmable.
OK. So you can send electrical
signals to the chip to say
which cube it should interact with
each other ones at which
time. Now the order for this
to work, the whole chip is
placed in that
evolution refrigerator.
That's the size of
a closet roughly.
And the calls it do about
one hundredth of a degree above
absolute zero. That's where
you get the superconductivity
that allows these bits to
briefly behave as cubits.
And IBM's research lab in
Yorktown Heights, New York, the
big tech company, houses
several quantum computers already
hooked up to the cloud.
Corporate clients such as Goldman
Sachs and JP Morgan are part
of IBM's Q Network, where they
can experiment with the
quantum machines and their
programming language.
So far, it's a way for
companies to get used to quantum
computing rather than make
money from it.
Quantum computers need exponentially
more cubits before
they start doing
anything useful.
IBM recently unveiled a fifty
three cubic computer the same
size as Google's
sycamore processor.
We think we're actually going
to need tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of qubits
to get to real business
problems. So you can see quite
a lot of advances and
doubling every year or perhaps even
a little faster is what
we need to get us there. That's
why it's 10 years out, at
least.
Quantum computing would need to
see some big advances
between then and now, bigger
advances than what occurred
during the timeline of classical
computing and Moore's Law.
Oh, we need better
than Moore's Law.
Moore's Law is doubling
every two years.
We're talking doubling
every year.
And occasionally some
really big jumps.
So what's quantum
computers become useful?
What can they do? Scientists first
came up with the idea
for quantum computers as a
way to better simulate quantum
mechanics. That's still the
main purpose for them.
And it also holds
the most moneymaking potential.
So one example is
the caffeine molecule.
Now, if you're like me,
you've probably ingested billions
or trillions of. Caffeine
molecules so far today.
Now, if computers are really
that good, really that
powerful. We have these
these tremendous supercomputers
that are out there. We should
be able to really take a
molecule and represented exactly
in a computer.
And this would be great
for many fields, health care,
pharmaceuticals, creating new
materials, creating new
flavorings anywhere where molecules
are in play.
So if we just start with
this basic idea of caffeine, it
turns out it's absolutely
impossible to represent one
simple little caffeine molecule
in a classical computer
because the amount of information
you would need to
represent it, the number of zeros
and ones you would need
is around ten to forty eight.
Now, that's a big number. That's
one with forty eight zeros
following it. The number of atoms
in the earth are about 10
to 100 times that number.
So in the worst case, one
caffeine molecule could use 10
percent of all the atoms in
the earth just for storage.
That's never going to happen.
However, if we have a quantum
computer with one hundred and
sixty cubits and this is a
model of a 50 kubert machine
behind me, you can kind of
figure, well, if we make good
progress, eventually we'll get up
to 160 good cubits.
It looks like we'll be able
to do something with caffeine,
a quantum computer, and it's
never going to be possible.
Classical computer and other potential
use comes from Wall
Street. Complex risk analysis
and economic forecasting.
Quantum computing also has
big potential for portfolio
optimization. Perhaps the biggest
business opportunity out
of quantum computing in the
short term is simply preparing
for the widespread
use of them.
Companies and governments are
already attempting to quantum
proof their most sensitive
data and secrets.
In 1994, a scientist at Bell
Labs named Peter Shaw came up
with an algorithm that
proved quantum computers could
factor huge numbers much more
quickly than their classical
counterparts. That also means
quantum computers is powerful
and efficient enough could
theoretically break RSA
encryption. RSA is the type
of encryption that underpins
the entire internet.
Quantum computers, the way they're
built now, would need
millions of cubits to
crack RSA cryptography.
But that milestone could be 20
or 30 years away and
governments and companies are beginning
to get ready for
it. For a lot of
people, that doesn't matter.
But for example, for health
records, if health records to
be opened up that could
compromise all kinds of things.
Government communications.
Banking records.
Sometimes even banking records
from decades ago contain
important information that you
don't want exposed.
But the problem we've got is
we don't really know when
we'll be able to do this or
even if we'll ever build one
big enough to do this.
But what we do now, is
that if you don't update your
cryptography now, all the messages
you send over the next
few years and the ones
in history could potentially be
read. What this means, for example,
is if you're a Cisco
selling networking equipment, you're
going to offer
quantum-safe encryption as an option
in the very near
future. Becayse even though it
doesn't look like you need
it right away. If your product
doesn't have it and a
competitor does, guess which
product gets bought?
One big issue facing
quantum computing, other than
increasing the number of
cubits while keeping things
stable, is that no one actually
knows the best way to build
a quantum computer. Yet the
Quantum computers, a Google of
IBM and other companies show
off are very much still
experiments. There's also a
big education gap.
Not many people are
studying quantum computing yet.
China is pouring billions
into quantum computing education,
and the U.S. Congress passed a
law in 2018 called the
National Quantum Initiative Act in
order to help catch up
watching people get
rid of him.
Which means that you want
to invest in them now.
You want to be hiring
people with quantum computing
knowledge. Not necessarily to
do quantum computing, but
because you want that intelligence
in your organisation so
you can take advantage of
it when it shows up.
Now China, with its promised $10
billion in it, is really
upping stakes in terms of
the number of Chinese quantum
physics PhDs that are
going to start appearing.
And you know if that
hair restoration or life extension
drug happens to be property
of the Chinese government, what
does that do to
the world economy?
That's much more powerful than
making war Other experts
have compared Google's announcement
to Sputnik, the Soviet
satellite launched into
orbit in 1957.
The beach ball sized satellite
was the first manmade object
to orbit the Earth. But
Sputnik didn't really do anything
useful other than prove launching
something into space was
possible. Many people are surprised
that where exactly we
are. For those who are just
getting started, they like to
make noise about vacuum tubes
and Sputnik and things like
this. But let me
give you some numbers.
IBM has had quantum computers on
the cloud for three and a
half years since May of 2016.
We're not in any
sort of Sputnik error.
We're not landing on the moon.
But for those of you who
like space history, I think we're
probably well into
Mercury or Gemini.
