This Week’s Science News from SWTG

Quantum's Hype & Hydrogen's Crash

Quantum Hype Goes Crazy. But Why?

At the end of last year, we saw an amazing surge in the stocks of all quantum computing firms. I must admit that this caught me completely by surprise. I really should have bought some D-Wave stocks, they shot up by like 1000% since the beginning of the year. Because of… nothing really.

So what is going on? Have people just totally lost their mind? It’s not a possibility that I would easily dismiss, but maybe there’s something else going on. I recently came across an interesting panel discussion among quantum computing experts that I think sheds some light on what is fuelling this hype.

This discussion took place in November at the conference on Quantum Techniques in Machine Learning. The following exchange is between Scott Aaronson from the University of Texas in Austin and Edward Farhi from MIT. Both have done a lot of work on quantum computing, but they have very different ideas about scientific integrity.

“You know I am dealing with people who see all these papers and have taken from them the impression that, well, there must be a quantum advantage for all these tasks that is known or else why are people writing all these things about it?”

“I mean we've seen companies go public on claims about these kinds of applications or pitch to investors on these claims and they say, well, look, there's papers about it. And so I think sometimes it's not enough when writing a paper to not say anything false. Rather, in an environment like this one has to anticipate and head off you the ways that people are going to misinterpret things.”

“I don't understand this. I don't feel this burden whatsoever. I don't care.”

“All right”

“I just don't care. I find it odd that you feel like this is, you know, something you have to fight for. I mean I don't care what people say, I don't care what people say after they read my papers, I just care that my papers are correct. That's it. My papers are correct, period.”

“Okay, I mean, I would say if some people don't feel the burden then that doubles the burden that other people have.”

That’s quite something. But before I say more about their disagreement, let me tell you how crazy the quantum situation has become.

Quantum computing is an existing technology but it’s far away from being practically useful. In principle, quantum computers could make certain calculations much faster, and that could become useful one day in areas such as material design, finance, or logistics. In reality, the best use cases are rapidly being occupied by artificial intelligence, especially in quantum chemistry.

And for quantum computers to become practically useful, the number of qubits that they can work with needs to dramatically increase, from currently around 100 to about 1 million, though the details depend on the error rate and the type of problem.

Yes, it’s nice that Google demonstrated that error correction works as advertised at 100 qubits or so. But they still need to scale that to a million. And the question isn’t just whether it’s possible, but whether it’s possible at a reasonable cost. By my personal estimate, commercially useful quantum computers are at least a decade away.

And so, quantum computing companies currently make money by renting out cloud access to small quantum chips for research purposes, which most of them do through Amazon’s cloud service. In November, Amazon announced that they are starting a “Quantum Embark” program, that, they say, will help customers to get into the quantum computing business which I remind you is a business that doesn’t exist.

But the stocks of several quantum computing companies, including D-Wave, Rigetti, and IonQ promptly shot up. The surprise surge even impressed CNBC’s Jim Cramer who correctly notes, however, that these companies don’t have any revenue.