Quantum computing – Under starter’s orders.

And so the next big race begins.

• A group of Chinese scientists is claiming to have reached quantum supremacy which while it means very little in practical realities at the moment, fires the starting gun on the next big technology race.
• Quantum computing offers a great deal of potential as it is capable of computation speeds that are impossible for current supercomputers but at the same time limitations in what they can actually do renders them useless for all practical purposes today.
• These systems can not be used to train the hugely data and power-hungry deep learning algorithms and they can not even play Tic-Tac-Toe or Pong.
• This is why they remain very much in the realm of deep technology research and rub shoulders with the likes of nuclear fusion in terms of when they might become commercial.
• “Quantum supremacy” is considered to be the watershed moment when a quantum computer can outperform the most advanced silicon-based system available today.
• Google has already made what I consider to be a flawed claim in this direction (see here) and now a group of Chinese research labs have done the same but using a completely different system.
• Google is using the more well-known approach of quantum states in superconductive materials that are running close to absolute zero (-273°C) while the Chinese system is based on light photons.
• The Chinese scientists have taken a 1980s technique called Gaussian boson sampling and have managed to scale it a huge degree such that they have achieved a system that they claim is 100 trillion times faster than could be achieved by today’s supercomputers.
• To put this in context, this is 380,518x faster than Google claimed which, if verified, puts the Chinese solution comfortably ahead of the US.
• It is in this area and others like AI, facial recognition, autonomous driving and robotics where the technology battle between the USA and China will be fought as RFM research has already concluded that semiconductors is a foregone conclusion.
• The problem for China in semiconductors is simply that it started much too late in the game and there is almost no scope to be able to become independent from the USA, Japan and The Netherlands who control all of the crucial technology to design and manufacture semiconductors.
• This is why the USA is pushing so hard on semiconductors because this is the only place where it has real leverage.
• Furthermore, this has a limited lifespan as at some point the current technology will no longer be able to improve processing speed, size and cost.
• Quantum computing offers real promise in the long-term as I think that it will significantly improve what current AI is capable of achieving.
• Deep learning has a voracious appetite compute power and so huge algorithms will be able to be trained in a matter of milliseconds.
• The caveat here is data.
• This is because massive amounts of labelled data are required to train these algorithms and this may end up being the next big bottleneck.
• This clearly demonstrates that China is a technological force to be reckoned with, and in areas outside of semiconductors, it will be competing on a level playing field with the USA.
• This will galvanise research efforts and, in all likelihood, trigger an increase in funding on both sides of the battle.
• Quantum computing is firmly on the horizon, but the journey still has many years yet to travel.
• So many years in fact that it may be a close race between quantum computing and nuclear fusion to see who arrives first.
• Silicon is here to stay for the foreseeable future.