Stealth Quantum Computing Company raises $215M to Build 1M Qbit Computer
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.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 08 2020, @03:17PM (24 children)
They can ride that pony forever, plus eternity. This will put to shame all the better-known and the lesser-known vaporwares that have never been released.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by TheReaperD on Wednesday April 08 2020, @04:13PM (16 children)
I would want to say that no one knowingly invests in vaporware but, bitcoin exists and makes money so, that would prove me wrong by default.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 5, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday April 08 2020, @04:53PM (15 children)
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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:46PM (14 children)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09 2020, @03:02AM (3 children)
And elementary education....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 09 2020, @04:04PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09 2020, @07:22PM (1 child)
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
It's also a very irrelevant difference.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 09 2020, @10:17AM (1 child)
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
(Score: 5, Touché) by fustakrakich on Wednesday April 08 2020, @08:21PM
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..
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:43PM (3 children)
$2 per Qbit - quite the bargain in today's Quantum computing landscape...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by captain normal on Wednesday April 08 2020, @07:53PM
At that price, I'll take 50. :-)
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 08 2020, @09:59PM (1 child)
They are shite qubits worth 0.0001-0.0003 "real" qubits each.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 08 2020, @11:00PM
Niiice, specsmanship in the quantum realm - as if normal specsmanship weren't indeterminate enough.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:51PM (1 child)
There's a lot of competition to create this impossible vaporware. Some company or university will eventually nail it down.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday April 08 2020, @08:01PM
Except that you need a quantum computer to figure out when that might be.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday April 08 2020, @08:42PM
Your skeptical negative vibes are collapsing it's wave function, you must BELIEVE to make it work! BTWm nothing would show it that you truly believe like writing a check for 250 million dollars!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @04:10PM (1 child)
** NEVER TAKE THE MARK, AT ALL COSTS! **
-- this article is here for historical reasons, never take the mark! --
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/08/09/you-get-chipped-eventually/547336001/ [usatoday.com]
You will get chipped — eventually
Jefferson Graham
USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — You will get chipped. It’s just a matter of time.
In the aftermath of a Wisconsin firm embedding microchips in employees last week to ditch company badges and corporate logons, the Internet has entered into full-throated debate.
Religious activists are so appalled, they’ve been penning nasty 1-star reviews of the company, Three Square Market, on Google, Glassdoor and social media.
On the flip side, seemingly everyone else wants to know: Is this what real life is going to be like soon at work? Will I be chipped?
“It will happen to everybody,” says Noelle Chesley, 49, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “But not this year, and not in 2018. Maybe not my generation, but certainly that of my kids.”
Gene Munster, an investor and analyst at Loup Ventures, is an advocate for augmented reality, virtual reality and other new technologies. He thinks embedded chips in human bodies is 50 years away. “In 10 years, Facebook, Google, Apple and Tesla will not have their employees chipped,” he says. “You’ll see some extreme forward-looking tech people adopting it, but not large companies.”
The idea of being chipped has too “much negative connotation” today, but by 2067 “we will have been desensitized by the social stigma,” Munster says.
A microchip is shown compared with a dime Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017, at Three Square Market in River Falls, Wis.,
For now, Three Square Market, or 32M, hasn’t offered concrete benefits for getting chipped beyond badge and log-on stats. Munster says it was a “PR stunt” for the company to get attention to its product and it certainly succeeded, getting the small start-up air play on CBS, NBC and ABC, and generating headlines worldwide. The company, which sells corporate cafeteria kiosks designed to replace vending machines, would like the kiosks to handle cashless transactions.
This would go beyond paying with your smartphone. Instead, chipped customers would simply wave their hands in lieu of Apple Pay and other mobile-payment systems.
The benefits don't stop there. In the future, consumers could zip through airport scanners sans passport or drivers license; open doors; start cars; and operate home automation systems. All of it, if the technology pans out, with the simple wave of a hand.
Not a GPS tracker
The embedded chip is not a GPS tracker, which is what many critics initially feared. However, analysts believe future chips will track our every move.
For example, pets for years have been embedded with chips to store their name and owner contact. Indeed, 32M isn’t the first company to embed chips in employees. In 2001, Applied Digital Solutions installed the “VeriChip” to access medical records but the company eventually changed hands and stopped selling the chip in 2010.
In Sweden, BioHax says nearly 3,000 customers have had its chip embedded to do many things, including ride the national rail system without having to show the conductor a ticket.
In the U.S., Dangerous Things, a Seattle-based firm, says it has sold “tens of thousands” of chips to consumers via its website. The chip and installation cost about $200.
After years of being a subculture, “the time is now” for chips to be more commonly used, says Amal Graafstra, founder of Dangerous Things. “We’re going to start to see chip implants get the same realm of acceptance as piercings and tattoos do now.”
In other words, they’ll be more visible, but not mainstream yet.
“It becomes part of you the way a cellphone does,” Graafstra says. “You can never forget it, and you can’t lose it. And you have the capability to communicate with machines in a way you couldn’t before.”
But after what we saw in Wisconsin last week, what's next for the U.S. workforce? A nation of workers chipping into their pods at Federal Express, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and other top corporations?
Experts contend consumers will latch onto chips before companies do.
Chesley says corporations are slower to respond to massive change and that there will be an age issue. Younger employees will be more open to it, while older workers will balk. “Most employers who have inter-generational workforces might phase it in slowly,” she says. “I can’t imagine people my age and older being enthusiastic about having devices put into their bodies.”
Adds Alec Levenson, a researcher at University of Southern California’s Center for Effective Organizations, “The vast majority of people will not put up with this.”
Three Square Market said the chips are voluntary, but Chesley says that if a company announces a plan to be chipped, the expectation is that you will get chipped — or risk losing out on advancement, raises and being a team player.
“That’s what we’re worried about,” says Bryan Allen, chief of staff for state Rep. Tina Davis (D), who is introducing a bill in Pennsylvania to outlaw mandatory chip embedding. “If the tech is out there, what’s to stop an employer from saying either you do this, or you can’t work here anymore.”
Several states have passed similar laws, while one state recently saw a similar bill die in committee. "I see this as a worker's rights issue," says Nevada state Sen. Becky Harris (R), who isn't giving up. "This is the wrong place to be moving," she says.
Should future corporations dive in to chipping their employees, they will have huge issues of “trust” to contend with, says Kent Grayson, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
“You’ve got to have a lot of trust to put one of those in your body,” Grayson says. Workers will need assurances the chip is healthy, can't be hacked, and its information is private, he says.
Meanwhile, religious advocates have taken to social media to express their displeasure about chipping, flooding 32M’s Facebook page with comments like “boycott,” “completely unnecessary” and “deplorable.” On 32M’s Google page, Amy Cosari a minister in Hager City, Wisc., urges employees to remove the chip.
“When Jesus was raised, he was raised body and soul, and it was him, not zombie, not a ghost and we are raised up in the same way,” Cosari wrote. ”Employees of 32Market, you are not a walking debit card.”
Get used to it, counsels Chesley.
Ten years ago, employees didn’t look at corporate e-mail over the weekend. Now they we do, “whether we like it or not,” he says.
Be it wearable technology or an embedded chip, the always on-always connected chip is going to be part of our lives, she says.
Contributing: Madeline Purdue in San Francisco.
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(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday April 08 2020, @08:10PM
Wow is this the reincarnation of MDC? Naw....Mike never slammed out such a incoherent WOT. With that mystery link in the last sentence, I'd say this comes pretty close to qualifying as SPAM.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:10PM
Welcome to Devs!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 08 2020, @07:01PM (4 children)
But... how many qubits of information are stored in each atom?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by captain normal on Wednesday April 08 2020, @08:13PM (2 children)
Not only that, but how did they arrived at a definite number of the atoms in the Universe, which the last time I looked was infinite?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 08 2020, @10:54PM
It is my understanding that the whole question of the infinitely expanding vs collapsing universe is one of total mass contained therein - with the infinitely expanding universe having somewhat less total mass in comparison to the energy with which it is expanding.
However... this does leave the question of matter->energy conversion very much open - if there is even a slight error in the assumptions about how much matter will convert to energy and vice-versa, that would seem to dramatically influence this infinitely expanding vs collapsing universe question. For instance: when a black hole swallows a star, how much more matter is converted to energy in that situation as compared to a star simply burning out?
Whatever answer they think they have for total number of atoms in the universe, I'd throw a fudge factor of +/- 10% of the number of orders of magnitude they think it is... in other words: Google says " it is estimated that the there are between 10E78 to 10E82 atoms in the known, observable universe", I'd be far less than shocked if the total true number weren't somewhere in the 10E70 to 10E90 range.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 09 2020, @01:18AM
They're speaking of what we can see. Most of those atoms have already slid outside of our universe. For example, according to present estimates of "negative energy" expansion, if it were possible through some sci fi scenario to change everything which we can access at the speed of light (say a sci fi end of universe scenario where some lab experiment gone wrong converts the universe to a lower vacuum state energy), we'd still only affect what presently is a sphere crudely a billion light years on a side.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @10:57PM
It's qubits all the way down, baby.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @07:24PM
That should arrive about the same time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @07:55PM
"More information than X," where X is an integer, is not how information is defined. Did he mean "able to count to the number of atoms", "as many bits as there are atoms", etc.? How did this person get a high ranking job without basic knowledge of the field?!
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday April 09 2020, @08:53PM
With the Google quantum computer cited as a benchmark at 56 qubits, these guys are going to increase the qubit count by more than four orders of magnitude for only $215 million?
And what have they got now after 5 years as a startup? Oh, I forgot, it's a secret...