Google Quantum Computing Supremacy Claims

The Quantum PR cycle has a "credibility problem."

Hello Everyone,

A bit caveat, as someone who covers innovation news around Quantum computing, I have precious little faith in the PR of IBM, Google or for the most part Microsoft around Quantum computing. These actors have nefarious Cloud incentives to pretend as if Quantum computing is reaching a useful level imminently. I do not believe that to be true, while Quantum computing may be a useful technology in the future.

So the headline isn’t very helpful:

Supercomputer makes calculations in blink of an eye that take rivals 47 years

So yet again, Google claims to have proved its supremacy over conventional machines with new quantum computer.

Think about it though, these aren’t even quantum computers really. While we call these devices quantum computers, they're more like prototypes of what quantum computers can be: At present they require super-specific, extreme conditions to operate in, and struggle to stay stable and error-free.

For Quantum startups they want to pretend that their products will be relevant soon and fit for commercial purposes and thus use this PR to their advantage, but what are they telling the public while doing so? Of course they are minor vendors need to buy into the hype that the Cloud players are creating, the companies that will for all intents and purposes devour any good IP, startups and products that will come to the space while making a few scientists, researchers and academics rich in the process. I’m not proud of this cealessy cycle of predatory “innovation”, but it is what it is.

The Stability A.I. CEO says there will be no “programmers” in five years, while it is claimed that Quantum computing could end encryption within five years, says Google boss.

Google thinks it’s a leader in “Quantum Supremacy” with a machine with merely 70 qubits. The latest system run by Google has a total of 70 operational qubits – the quantum equivalents of classical bits that can represent 1, or 0, or both at the same time, potentially allowing for certain calculations to be performed at astonishing speeds. Truly astonishing, when a good Quantum computer will need millions of qubits.

At least Microsoft has a plan with topological qubits that could go somewhere, but what are IBM and Google even doing but singing the same old tune? A paper from researchers at Google published online claims that the company’s latest technology is “beyond the capabilities of existing classical supercomputers”.

If BigTech isn’t proselytizing LLMs, it’s quantum computing. Certainly Quantum Machine Learning (QML) might come to something, one day. Certainly LLMs at the intersection of Quantum computing when we have Quantum computers of thousands or rather millions of qubits will be fascinating.

The Telegraph isn’t exactly a great source for information about Quantum computing.

• Google scientists are reporting in a new study that it completed a computational task on a quantum computer that would take a classical supercomputer 47 years to complete.

• The task was a random circuit sampling calculation.

• The experiment was carried out in the latest version of the Sycamore processor that has been boosted to 70 qubits.

Meanwhile Google thinks all of our data belongs to them, for training of LLMs. The change to their privacy policy was pretty glaring recently. Google has updated its privacy policy to state that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models. The tech giant has changed the wording of its policy over the weekend and switched "AI models" for "language models." It also stated that it could use publicly available information to build not just features, but full products like "Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities." Even as OpenAI faces many lawsuits including from authors, painters and supposedly used Reddit comments scraping text from around the internet.

Google’s claim of Quantum Supremacy has been challenged by researchers at nearly ever turn. It’s been practically debunked and now they are at it again. It’s not as if Google’s 2019 claims changed the world. They only put us on notice that BigTech is likely going to consolidate the Quantum computing startup space, if it arrives at any valid and useful in the 2020s.

There is so much deception in the PR of Quantum Computing, it really makes you wonder at how many of these startups are even on to something that has a monetization or commercial future.