(2018-07-15) Azhar Quantum Computing

Azeem Azhar on Quantum computing

The biggest technical issues relate to error-correction, coherence and scaling the number of qubits to usable. But I hear time and again from quantum experts that these problems are now increasingly in the realm of engineering, rather than science

*If quantum computing promises so much including in the not-so-distant-future, quantum computing giving humanity its biggest dividend ever - surviving or mitigating the impact of climate change - then shouldn’t we be doubling down on it?

This would lead to expectations of huge levels of investment.*

What we actually see is a very nascent field, with investment levels slowly rising, but the field remains tiny. We looked at three vectors: what had governments announced, what did we find from public announcements of investments in quantum computing companies, how much had large companies invested in the quantum computing domain.

We reckon, from a rough LinkedIn count, that fewer than 2,000 people are involved in companies working in any part of the quantum stack (and that includes all the marketing and PR types attached to these groups in large companies)

The venture dollars flowing intro quantum computing is small with D-Wave ($175m), Rigetti ($70m), Cambridge Quantum Computing ($50m) and IonQ ($20m) leading the pack.

Which is it? Close to maturity or facing a long journey?

Here are the three things holding us back:

Venture investors need returns within a time frame

Governments haven’t stepped up to the plate as the “investor of first resort” in basic technologies, in recent years

there is an exception to all this. And that exception is China where a National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences will attract between $10-16bn of investment when it opens in two years.