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posted by martyb on Wednesday April 08 2020, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-has-the-power? dept.

Stealth Quantum Computing Company raises $215M to Build 1M Qbit Computer

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/04/06/palo-alto-quantum-computing-startup-scores-215m-to.html

PsiQuantum Corp. on Monday said it raised $215 million to help it develop a commercial quantum computer more powerful than machines being developed by Google, IBM, Honeywell, and a host of startups and university labs.

Jeremy O'Brien, co-founder and CEO of the 5-year-old Palo Alto startup, told Bloomberg that the company expects to build a computer with 1 million qubits, or quantum bits, within "a handful of years."

[...] "If they are really able to pull this off, it immediately distinguishes them and puts them in a completely different field so far ahead of the competition," Peter Rohde, a Future Fellow at the Centre for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney, told Bloomberg.

CEO O'Brien and co-founders [...] formed PsiQuantum in Silicon Valley to develop a computer that essentially runs on light.

They have assembled a team of more than 100 to build what is known as a silicon photonic quantum computer.

Samir Kumar, general manager of Microsoft Corp.'s venture capital unit who has invested in PsiQuantum, put in perspective what the company says its machine will be able to do: "By the time you get to 80 qubits, you are in a place where the qubits are storing more information than the total number of atoms in the entire universe."

Quantum Computing Startup Raises $215 Million for Faster Device

PsiQuantum's photon-based model is still years away, but the company says it'll be more powerful than Google's or IBM's.

PsiQuantum, a 5-year-old startup based in Palo Alto, Calif., says it's well on its way to creating a commercial quantum machine, the boldest claim to date among a legion of hopefuls in the field. It has raised $215 million to build a computer with 1 million qubits, or quantum bits, within "a handful of years," co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeremy O'Brien tells Bloomberg Businessweek. While the qubit figure will mean little to people outside the industry, it's considered the breakthrough point for making a true, general-purpose quantum computer that would be broadly useful to businesses. As such, PsiQuantum's machine would mark a major leap forward and deal a devastating blow to rival projects by the likes of Google, Honeywell, IBM, and a sea of startups and university labs. "If they are really able to pull this off, it immediately distinguishes them and puts them in a completely different field so far ahead of the competition," says Peter Rohde, a Future Fellow at the Centre for Quantum Software & Information at the University of Technology Sydney. "This strikes me as incredibly exciting."

The "if" from Rohde reflects the challenges of quantum computing and, partly, the secrecy that has surrounded PsiQuantum's work. O'Brien's interview with Bloomberg Businessweek is his first detailed discussion of the company's technology since its founding in 2015. The CEO and his co-founders (Terry Rudolph, Mark Thompson, and Pete Shadbolt) are Australian and British academics turned industrialists. Over the past five years, they've hired more than 100 people to help them try to develop what's known as a silicon photonic quantum computer—essentially, a computer that runs on light.

[...] These properties, in theory, allow quantum computers to achieve a quantum speedup, which grows exponentially as more qubits are added to the system. The ramifications are mind-blowing. "By the time you get to 80 qubits, you are in a place where the qubits are storing more information than the total number of atoms in the entire universe," says Samir Kumar, general manager of Microsoft Corp.'s venture capital arm, which has invested in PsiQuantum. Practically speaking, this means large calculations that would take decades or centuries to complete using even modern supercomputers can be performed in minutes on a quantum machine. The belief is this will lead to stunning breakthroughs in chemistry, biology, and other scientific fields.

[...] The techniques PsiQuantum is pursuing were considered virtually impossible to pull off for a time. Among other obstacles, scientists thought a machine based on photonics would have to be incredibly large. "As we began working on this architecture, it appeared that our machine would have to be the size of the Sierra Nevada mountain range," O'Brien says. After a series of research advances, however, his team has set to work building its first computer, which it expects will be the size of an office conference room. GlobalFoundries, one of the world's top chipmakers, has already started producing early versions of PsiQuantum's chips using its standard manufacturing facilities. (This marks a significant contrast with other quantum experiments, which rely on exotic materials and custom manufacturing.) Now it's up to O'Brien's engineers to create quantum variants of the networking, software, and the other components needed to make a functioning computer. "We're going to be building them as fast as you can," O'Brien says.

[...] PsiQuantum's big claim is that its technology will be able to string together 1 million qubits and distill out 100 to 300 error-corrected or "useful" qubits from that total. O'Brien and PsiQuantum's backers question whether Google can ever reach similar qubit totals with its technology. "It is like climbing a tree to get to the moon," says Peter Barrett, a general partner at Playground Global, which invested in PsiQuantum. A Google spokesperson says the company typically does not comment on rivals' work.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday April 08 2020, @04:53PM (15 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday April 08 2020, @04:53PM (#980308) Journal

    Bitcoin is not vapourware. It is a fully implemented system. You may question its value, but you can't deny its existence.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:46PM (14 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:46PM (#980317)

    It is a fully implemented system.

    Integer mathematics is also a fully implemented system, I don't see anybody bidding $10K for the number 9.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:46PM (12 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:46PM (#980333) Journal

      I have bad news for you: The money on your bank account also is nothing but some numbers stored on the computer of your bank. And when you pay with your credit card, all that happens is transmitting some numbers between computers, that cause some other numbers on computers to be changed.

      Anyway, you seem to have no clue what the term “vapourware” means. It has nothing to do with what people are willing to pay for it.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:56PM (11 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:56PM (#980336)

        I've done plenty of presentations to investment bankers, I know exactly what vapourware is (stateside we call it vaporware), and I also have a fair idea of how many millions you can get for it.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 2, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday April 08 2020, @07:27PM (10 children)

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday April 08 2020, @07:27PM (#980350) Journal

          If you know what vapourware is, you are very good at hiding that knowledge (and no, talking in front of investment bankers doesn't prove that you know what you are talking about).

          Here's a hint: If I tell you that I'll write a hello world program, then it's vapourware. After I've written that hello world program, it's no longer vapourware. It may be worth nothing, it may be utterly useless, it may even be buggy and print “hello word” instead, but it is not vapourware for the one single reason that it exists.

          And bitcoin exists, and there is no question about that. And it doesn't depend on what you think about it, whether you think that it is completely worthless, or a waste of energy, or an ecological crime, all that doesn't matter for the question whether it is vapourware, because that is not what the term “vapourware” is about. It is about just one thing: Existence.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
          • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @09:17PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @09:17PM (#980390)

            Huh. So are you saying ideas don’t exist? Like, I don’t know, freedom? A lot of the libertarians around here might be interested to know that doesn’t exist. Are many of the words in the U.S. Constitution “vaporware”?

            Just curious...

            • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday April 09 2020, @12:38AM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 09 2020, @12:38AM (#980448) Journal

              So are you saying ideas don’t exist? Like, I don’t know, freedom?

              There's a vast difference between the idea of freedom, like you name dropping it in this thread, and an implementation of freedom, like say a working democracy. If you talk about freedom without an implementation, then that's vaporware just as surely as if you were talking about a QC system that's going to beat all those other imaginary QC systems.

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 08 2020, @10:58PM (7 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday April 08 2020, @10:58PM (#980416)

            Just to arc pedantic back on you: I never asserted anything one way or the other about bitcoin being vapourware or not, I simply stated that the system of integer mathematics is quite well developed, but a gold rush to stake claims in its vast territory (of which bitcoins are, ironically, just a tiny subset), has yet to materialize.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 09 2020, @12:40AM (4 children)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 09 2020, @12:40AM (#980450) Journal
              OTOH, I bet you many orders of magnitude more than $10k are spent on implementations of integer math in the form of math and encryption software.
              • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09 2020, @03:02AM (3 children)

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday April 09 2020, @03:02AM (#980484)

                And elementary education....

                --
                🌻🌻 [google.com]
                • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 09 2020, @04:04PM (2 children)

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 09 2020, @04:04PM (#980597) Journal
                  It wasn't hard, once you started to think about it, right?
                  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09 2020, @07:22PM (1 child)

                    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday April 09 2020, @07:22PM (#980647)

                    There's a very real difference between investment in a technology and simple "land rush" investment in unique numbers.

                    --
                    🌻🌻 [google.com]
                    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 09 2020, @08:16PM

                      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 09 2020, @08:16PM (#980656) Journal

                      There's a very real difference between investment in a technology and simple "land rush" investment in unique numbers.

                      It's also a very irrelevant difference.

            • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 09 2020, @10:17AM (1 child)

              by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday April 09 2020, @10:17AM (#980536) Journal

              Just to arc pedantic back on you: I never asserted anything one way or the other about bitcoin being vapourware or not

              Yes, you did. Remember, your message does not just consist of the words you wrote, but also of the context in which you wrote the words, and the very fact that you decided to send a message, and to send that specific message and not another one.

              In this case the context was that you replied to a comment by me where I said that bitcoin is not vapourware but a fully implemented system. There is absolutely no reasonable way to interpret your reply as anything but a way to say that you consider bitcoin vapourware despite being a fully implemented system.

              --
              The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 09 2020, @04:05PM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 09 2020, @04:05PM (#980598) Journal
                I agree. If you don't want to be misinterpreted, then write something different.
    • (Score: 5, Touché) by fustakrakich on Wednesday April 08 2020, @08:21PM

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Wednesday April 08 2020, @08:21PM (#980367) Journal

      I don't see anybody bidding $10K for the number 9

      Yeah, put it on the six.

      --
      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..