Personally I find quantum computers really impressive, and they havent been given its righteous hype.
I know they won’t be something everyone has in their house but it will greatly improve some services.
Quantum Computing is still climbing the slope from TT to the Peak of Inflated Expectations. There is still little to no major hype, as its still in “R&D/testing” it is slow, it is expensive (Very) limited due to all the surrounding tech required to make it work like cooling, containment etc…
Compare this to AI.
AI is at and heading down from the Peak towards the Trough of Disillusionment. It was easy (relatively) to implement, easy to evolve as how nVidia did, simply throw more silicon at it. The Hype was easy to generate because even while totally misinformed, media and other people out there thought they could easily sell it. Even though most of what they claimed was turd, it sounded amazing and a game changer even in the early stages, and businesses lapped it up. Now they are feeling the pain, and seeing that there are still major hurdles to get passed.
The kind of LLM that caused this hype with GPT3 is in R&D since the 60’s. I belive we’re in the 70’s of Quantum Coputing. When It’ll be measured, it’d be just as easy and relatively cheep to produce and advance as AI today
QC is likely to remain the domain of liquid nitrogen-cooled machines for a long time to come, possibly forever. I can run a basic LLM on a Raspberry Pi–and I have–but it’s highly unlikely QC will ever be that easy.
considering that no one who isn’t involved in the creation of them is talking about quantum computing in regards to quarterly profits or posting about it on LinkedIn trying to score a lead, it may be as far left on the chart as possible.
AI is way different. It’s more like a series of hills where Sysiphus is pushing the boulder up to the peak, only to see another higher peak as the boulder rolls down the slope of disillusionment.
The thing is that quite a few things initially called AI have climbed that hype curve, rolled down into disillusionment, and quite a few have climbed back to a plateau of increased productivity. Each time we realize that’s either not AI or only a step toward AI. We’ve gotten a lot of useful functionality but the actual progress seems to be mainly clarifying what intelligence is or is not
I know they won’t be something everyone has in their house
That’s what they said about non-quantum computers 80 years ago.
We’re in the “grifters collecting donations” phase for the foreseeable future.
Trough of disillusionment
You think we’ve made it that far?
Quantum computers have no place in typical consumer technology, its practical applications are super high level STEM research and cryptography. Beyond being cool to conceptualize why would there be hype around quantum computers from the perspective of most average people who can barely figure out how to post on social media or send an email?
…and cryptography.
I think I’m a typical consumer, and if I’m not mistaken we use cryptography constantly (https and banking, off the top of my head). If quantum computers are important for cryptography, it’s hard to imagine “regular people” having no use.
Cryptography is most of the hype I’ve heard. It’s usually something along the lines of imagine all encryption/certificates being breakable instantly
That’s not the case, quantum computing can only break specific types of cryptography.
Hype ≠ Reality
Your use of Cryptography is probably roughly on the level of “Having a strong password.”
The application of quantum computers will largely in in BREAKING security. You’re not going to have a quantum-security module in your phone or home computer.
Not necessarily we could get better more complex security at boot with a qbit TPM chip. Every time you log into a secure boot environment you are solving a hash which is in the wheelhouse of quantum compute.
Imagine quantum PCs get usable and we don’t update users cryptography 😂 you could as well communicate in plain text in that case
Specifically breaking prime number based cryptography.
People thought the same of binary computers in their development phase.
Yeah, why would a farmer need a fancy calculator the size of a room? 🙄
I think we’re still headed up the peak of inflated expectations. Quantum computing may be better at a category of problems that do a significant amount of math on a small amount of data. Traditional computing is likely to stay better at anything that requires a large amount of input data, or a large amount of output data, or only uses a small amount of math to transform the inputs to the outputs.
Anything you do with SQL, spreadsheets, images, music and video, and basically anything involved in rendering is pretty much untouchable. On the other hand, a limited number of use cases (cryptography, cryptocurrencies, maybe even AI/ML) might be much cheaper and fasrer with a quantum computer. There are possible military applications, so countries with big militaries are spending until they know whether that’s a weakness or not. If it turns out they can’t do any of the things that looked possible from the expectation peak, the whole industry will fizzle.
As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won’t be a comparable, “then grow the circuit size by a factor of ten million” step. I think they probably can’t do anything world shaking.
As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won’t be a comparable
Thanks for saying this. I see a lot of people who assume all technology always gets better all the time. Truth is, things do have limits, and sometimes things hit a dead end and never get better than they are. Those things tend to get stuck in the lab and you never hear about them.
Inflated Expectations. Most people who are aware of them will still talk about how they’re going to destroy crypto. We are very, very far off from the size of QC that could possibly do that. It may not even be feasible to do the quantum juggling act necessary to handle that many qbits. It primarily effects public key crypto, with relatively minor effects on block ciphers and hashes. Plus, we already have post-quantum crypto making its way into TLS and other cryptographic suites.
And don’t get me started on the morons who think the NSA already has some super secret breakthrough QC that can already break all crypto. Often from the same sorts of people who (correctly) throw Russell’s Teapot at creationists.
Meanwhile, there are far more interesting possibilities that don’t need so many qbits. Things like improving logistics or molecular simulation.
I think AI is falling into disillusionment and Quantum Computers feel at least 10 years behind.
AI is falling into disillusionment for like the 10th time now. We just keep redefining what AI is to mean “whatever is slightly out of reach for modern computers”.
Hahaha, I kept saying this to myself while going through this thread. I mean there is a whole wiki page on the concept of AI winters because it’s such a common occurrence - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
I dunno if anyone except scientists and security people think about quantum computing at the moment.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
I’d say it’s still at the beginning of the curve. At the technology trigger phase. I don’t hear about it as much as I would expect
Yeah as we have seen with LLMs, unless there is practical use for the average person, nobody cares.
One problem with QC is that besting classical computers has been a moving target, improving exponentially for many years while QC was being researched. It’s going to be a long, slow climb up the slope of enlightenment as it reveals its potential.
Well, yes and no.
Quantum computers will likely never beat classical computing on classical algorithms, for exactly the reasons you stated, classical just has too much of a head start.
But there are certain problems with quantum algorithms that are exponentially faster than the classical algorithms. Quantum computers will be better on those problems very quickly, but we are still working on building reliable QCs. Also, we currently don’t know very many quantum algorithms with that degree of speedup, so as others have said there isn’t many use cases for QCs yet.
Kind of like cpus and gpus perform radically different depending on what’s fed into it.
All points on that curve, at the same time just now, for undefined values of now.
I personally think we’re on the slope of enlightenment - quantum computing no longer attracts as much hype as it used to, but in the background, there’s a lot of interesting developments that genuinely might be very important.
I’d agree, but that slope will be a long and hard one. And the hype cycle may have many more peaks and troughs of disillusionment, from new breakthroughs, but the researchers will still make steady progress.
Quantum computers are now where neural nets were in the 1980s.
Good reference to compare with, but any sources?
It’s just an opinion
Somewhere around 0,0 or 1,1
There are amazing possibilities in the theoretical space, but there hasn’t been enough of a breakthrough on how to practically make stable qubits on a scale to create widespread hype
Quantum computers don’t lie: it’s not like thawed can run generative ai
