The U.S. and China still Mull over Quantum's Future

May, 2023 shows a Quantum innovation race is just getting started.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Hello Everyone,

I wonder often at what role Quantum computing will end up playing in the A.I. arms race between the U.S. and China would might include decades of strategic competition in the global economy, technology, political influence and global influence on a scale we’ve rarely seen before.

Quantum computing might one day be able to model and conduct simulations on different strategies each country could use to forward their respective goals on multiple levels.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell what’s real or what’s going on in this murky realm. The House Committee on Space, Science and Technology scheduled a hearing on quantum technologies for June 7. As I understand it, this will be a congressional hearing to gauge U.S.’s commitment to National Quantum Initiative.

Meanwhile across the world, a 176-qubit quantum computing platform named Zuchongzhi went online for global users on May 31st, 2023, which is expected to push forward the development of quantum computing hardware and its ecosystem, according to the Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

So according to the NQI Advisory Committee: the National Quantum Initiative (NQI) should be ‘reauthorized and expanded’. Findings for the first independent assessment of the National Quantum Initiative Act recommend the program should be reauthorized and expanded. The report indicates that NQI has “increased the United States’ capacity in quantum information science and technology (QIST) R&D.”

The report is a 19 page PDF you can read it here:

Meanwhile there’s been a flurry of news out of China with regards to Quantum in May and June (so far) in 2023. China Telecom says they have invested 3 billion yuan ($434 million) to establish the China Telecom Quantum Information Technology Group Co., it said in a statement on its official WeChat account on May 27th, 2023.

Equally China is setting up major A.I. funds to try to keep up with Generative A.I. and support startups that are finding it difficult to operate in the post-covid environment. chinese search giant Baidu Inc will set up a venture capital fund of 1 billion yuan ($145 million) to back start-ups focused on content generated by artificial intelligence applications is said also that same weak on May 28th, 2023.

What will be the potential relationship between Transformer LLMs and Quantum computing? If anyone is going to work on that, it’s likely going to be China at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.

Reading about the U.S bureaucracy around technology at the Government level is confusing. The National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC) is the Federal Advisory Committee called for in the National Quantum Initiative Act. The NQI in their report above, recommends all authorized QIST programs should be funded at the authorized levels. More parts or the world are allocating some of their National Defense budgets to Quantum computing, even before real (and useful) Quantum computers exist.

The National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC) published its first independent assessment of the National Quantum Initiative (NQI) program, including recommendations for enhancements to the Program, in a report titled, Renewing the National Quantum Initiative: Recommendations for Sustaining American Leadership in Quantum Information Science.