Quantum computing has a moment. But the technology is futuristic

It doesn’t have the buzz of artificial intelligence, but quantum computing has its own moments.

Some of the most powerful institutions in the world, including Google,,,,, Microsoft,,,,, Amazon,,,,, IBM The U.S. government will spend millions of dollars developing and manufacturing the first practical quantum computer in a competition.

According to one McKinsey Company Reportas investors enter an industry, the industry could earn nearly $100 billion in revenue in a decade.

However, there is not much business today. According to the same report, the total revenue of quantum computing companies in 2024 is below $750 million.

But more and more words, we have heard of a big breakthrough.

Over the past year, Microsoft Revealed Its first quantum chip, Google executive explain This technology may be only five years away, Amazon exhibit Its error correction quantum processor and IBM Overview It plans to build meaningful quantum computers by 2029.

Joining them are scores for small companies and universities engaged in basic mathematics, software or potential business models. Some companies have even been traded publicly, and can be seen soaring their stocks or crashing based on news cores.

January Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Send quantum computing stocks When he said 15 years “early”, consider how long quantum computing will be useful. He said 20 years were “a time frame that a group of us believed in.”

Two months later, he go back These comments, but are also surprised by their transfer of markets, or even markets to transfer.

“How does quantum computer companies make public?” Huang said in March.

Currently, quantum computers can do anything useful. They are purely for research.

But the promise is clear. If the technology works, it can correct certain numbers and perform some tasks that are currently impossible on traditional computers, or it takes so much time that the universe ends before it is finished.

Imagine a quantum computer, you have to fundamentally change the way you think about the meaning of computing.

A traditional computer works because there are billions of transistors on each chip. Those transistors can be one or zero. To a large extent, transistors can represent almost every number, refer to a portion of the system memory, and perform arithmetic. This is how every computer in the world works today.

In quantum computers, the system uses Qubits instead of transistors. It is much more complex than zero and zero. Whether Qubits are turned on or off is determined by quantum mechanics, and all qubits are “entangled”, meaning that one change affects other probabilities.

Making Qubits work can require a lot of infrastructure. For example, some quantum computers must operate at very cold temperatures, close to absolute zero.

Many applications of quantum have been linked to simulated chemistry and physics so far.

“Quantum computers will not be the first choice for every application,” said Krysta Svore, senior vice president of quantum development at Microsoft. “Even if we only use quantum computers for materials science and chemistry, 96% of the world’s manufacturing goods rely on chemistry and materials science.”

Security researchers worry about what they say q-dayor create an effective quantum computer a day. When passwords and encryption start to fail mysteriously, they predict chaos.

“In addition to its potential benefits, quantum computing poses significant risks to the U.S. economy and national security,” the Biden White House said in 2022. National Security Memorandum. A quantum computer with password-related crypto-related “could potentially endanger civilian and military communications, undermine supervision and control systems of critical infrastructure, and defeat security protocols for most Internet-based financial transactions,” the memorandum said.

There is no actual application or algorithm that can run on quantum computers, which today cannot be done on a normal digital computer based on silicon.

However, several groups said they have proven “quantum supremacy”, indicating that they have a problem with quantum computers that will take longer to use traditional computers. These actions are abstract.

Google was the first person to declare quantum supremacy in 2019, describing its quantum computer achievements as “Benchmark. “The task it performs is called random circuit sampling, which is basically only used to test quantum computers.

Google said the researchers provided computer random instructions to make the problem as complex as possible under quantum mechanics. Its researchers were then able to prove that quantum computers were faster when cracking quantum problems. Last year, Google said its new, faster smoke-free layer of quantum computers widened the performance gap.

As far as future real-life applications are concerned, most of the potential of quantum computers is in the fields of medicine, chemistry and materials research.

Google points out that drug discovery or discovery may be molecules that are useful drugs. It also said that quantum computers will be able to perform the science needed for the commercialization of converged energy.

When Microsoft announced its first quantum chip in February, the company highlighted chemical and materials science issues such as corrosion of certain materials or how to composted plastics.

There are also some optimistic quantum computers that will be well suited to generate training data for AI applications, especially for situations or problems where there are a large number of potential solutions.

Google Researcher Maintain web pages This will classify many of the most prominent quantum algorithms.

The most famous one is Shor’s algorithmwhich suggests that the main factor in quantum computers being able to find large numbers is much faster than it is currently possible on digital computers.

When the algorithm was discovered in 1994, it attracted some attention from armies around the world. Many of them use an encryption method called RSA, which requires a large amount of computational process to keep the data secret.

“If there is no effective mitigation, the impact on the adversarial use of quantum computers could have (national security systems) and our country,” the Pentagon said. Say 2021.

Microsoft has acknowledged national security factors and even made quantum security a match with China.

Microsoft President Brad Smith Brad Smith Write In April’s blog post.

The government has worked hard to shift encryption to what is called post-quantitative approach, and quantum computers cannot destroy it. Such as apple Integration of quantum post-cryptography has begun Services like iMessage.

But past communications can still contain secrets. Intelligence agencies and other hackers often collect encrypted data because they expect to be decrypted one day.

Currently, most of the work of quantum is still quite academic.

Today, most advanced hardware companies are doing “error corrections”, or multiple methods designed to reduce the number of errors and make it less harmful when it occurs.

According to Microsoft researchers, in today’s quantum computers, the use of qubits is often 1 out of 1,000 times. Microsoft explain Last week, it was able to reduce the error rate by 1,000 times thanks to a new approach.

Several improvements to error correction have been announced over the past year, which is one of the reasons why researchers and engineers are becoming increasingly confident that they can build quantum computers.

The next problem to be solved is to expand the computer.

Google’s new Willow chips have 105 tons. Microsoft has eight Majorana chips. IBM’s Starling plan has 200 QUAT. Amazon’s Ocelot chip has 14 QUAT. These numbers must gradually increase over the next few years. Google and Microsoft say a truly useful quantum computer will cost 1 million tons.

watch: Quantum computing reaches the inflection point