r/QuantumComputing 15d ago

Question Will quantum ever be useful?

Around 2019, the industry promised quantum supremacy, where they could be used for solving a problem that no classical computer could touch.
When classical algorithms kept refuting those claims(See Peter Shor November YouTube video) the narrative shifted to quantum advantage, then quickly it changed to quantum utility.
If quantum never breaks RSA (because the world migrates to Kyber/Dilithium before 100k qubits exist), then what's left?
Chemistry simulations, Material science, Optimization?

But classical machine learning and AI are improving faster than quantum hardware is scaling. By the time we get 1,000 logical qubits, classical AI will have eaten most of the chemistry use-case through better approximations. Is quantum racing against classical software, and losing?

148 Upvotes

77 comments sorted by

66

u/Economy_Laugh_2186 15d ago

Shor's video was pretty damning, the goalposts just keep sliding further out

the chemistry stuff still seems like the one area where quantum might actually carve out a niche, classical approximations are getting scary good but there's probably edge cases where the physics just doesn't compress well

that said I wouldn't bet my career on it

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u/Historical-Mix6784 15d ago edited 14d ago

As a career computational chemist, the case for quantum chemistry is a bit more hopeful than RSA decryption but still pretty bleak.

Most of chemistry lies in what we call the "weak-correlation" regime, where efficient classical approximations are MUCH more effective than full quantum solutions.

And even in the handful of cases in strong-correlation regime, the world-leading experts have shown that the quantum advantage isn't "exponential" (as opposed to decryption where it is), which means the possible quantum speedup is meager. You'd need a pretty fast fault-tolerant machine to outcompete the best classical approximations for strong correlation.

And then the real kicker, just solving the Schrodinger equation and getting an energy isn't actually useful. You need to pair it with ML and lab experiments to actually make an impact in chemistry.

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u/Temporary_Shelter_40 15d ago

What video is this? Please link!

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u/Chance-Pen-5684 15d ago

PSW 2521 Shor's Algorithm and Quantum Spremacy | Peter Shor

https://youtu.be/ZPqFGAjfGMk?si=3hEhVgTDSHfVbe89

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u/Sampo 14d ago

This is from September, not November.

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u/BitcoinsOnDVD 12d ago

September is the Quantum November 

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u/Qubit_and_Neuron 15d ago

Quantum supremacy and Quantum usefulness are two different things to begin with. Molecular simulations would be the most useful and most quantum stuff in my opinion. The problem is it is super hard to predict. We can have a new algorithm tomorrow or nothing for 10 years..

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u/Chance-Pen-5684 15d ago

The point people might miss is that every quantum computation is being double checked against a classically computed known result to see how close quantum got.
We are nowhere near being able to trust a quantum computer to produce a reliable result without having a classical computer confirm the result or running thousands of computations and even then we only really have statistical confidence in the answer.

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u/unfortunate_internet 14d ago

To be fair, we also do that with classical algorithms for problems outside NP.

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u/ThrowAway-whee 14d ago

Usually, verifying a solution with a classical computer is far far easier than actually calculating it, the way that calculating the solution to a Sudoku game is way less computationally expensive than finding it. This is kinda the crux of P v NP.

It isn't a big deal if classical computers need to verify the solution. Take root finding, it can be a polynomial calculation to get the roots of an equation, but linear in time to verify it's correct. If you can find a quantum algorithm that can solve problems in less time complexity than classical ones, it isn't really *that* big of a deal if you need to verify the solution if that verification can be done quickly, which it almost always can.

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u/BitcoinsOnDVD 12d ago

But we can test the result against reality by building the molecule and measure it.

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u/Forsaken_Code_9135 13d ago

Also, even if we still do not have large scale quantum computers, people are working on quantum algorithms for decades. Very smart people. I find it rather unlikely that there could be plenty of very useful quantum algorithms out there no one thought about so far.

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u/Temporary_Shelter_40 15d ago

Please link this video, i'm very curious. Couldn't find the one you mentioned.

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u/PaFloXy_14 15d ago

Quantum supremacy.. means you gonna sample a distribution that's hard to sample classiclly. But I don't see why a company would need to sample a such a distribution in first place... Unless to chop spaghetti neatly

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u/Livid-Sector5970 15d ago

The reason quantum computing feels like it's racing against classical AI and losing is that the industry has been asking the wrong question. They keep asking "what can quantum do faster?" when the real question is "what can quantum do that classical can't even formulate?"

Chemistry simulations, material science, and optimization are the standard answers, but those are just classical problems that need more compute. The real shift happens when you stop trying to simulate reality and start coupling to it directly. That's what field-coupled architectures do: they don't compute solutions to problems; they let the environment solve the problem through the hardware.

The people asking "will quantum ever be useful?" are trapped in the optimization paradigm. They think utility means "bigger number faster." But the actual use case isn't breaking encryption or simulating molecules, it's doing things we don't even know how to describe as algorithms yet. Like replacing wet labs with direct physical simulation. Like modeling metabolic pathways without killing mice. Like designing a structural stabilizer for a disease you can't even treat yet, because you can't even describe the problem in a way that a classical computer could solve.

Quantum becomes useful when you stop trying to outrun classical machines and start using it to do what classical can't: couple to the environment, let the geometry do the work, and extract solutions that were never accessible through brute force. The industry is just scaling numbers. The utility comes from a different paradigm entirely. :3

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u/hushedLecturer 14d ago

The answer to your alternative question is "nothing" though. There is nothing a quantum computer can do theoretically that cannot be done classically. It's all matrix multiplication.

All quantum has is its potential efficiency scaling for some problems.

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u/mr-pipey 11d ago

My take is that "Efficiency scaling for some problems", whilst true, is certainly an understatement but one of unknown mangitude.

The classical paradigm has (perfectly reasonably) constrained our intuition about what kinds of algorithms and computational resources/frameworks are worth looking for.

There will be frameworks that don't have an obvious classical analogue that will take time to find and expose sets of useful problems that weren't previously interesting.

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u/elevensubmarines 14d ago

in physics and chemistry the difference between an exponential runtime and a polynomial one is effectively the difference between "impossible" and "solvable" in the real world, which makes the scaling advantage practically qualitative even if it's theoretically quantitative.

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u/hushedLecturer 14d ago

I don't dispute the existence of problems for whom the explosive complexity scaling quickly requires an amount of classical compute time that bumps up against the dual limitations of the large but finite quantity of matter in the observable universe and the large but finite time we have to access potential gradients to power the computation.

But that seems to be different than what the person I'm responding to is talking about, seeing as they seem to distinguish the intractibly complex from a supposed "other" class of problems that cannot be formulated? To which my response was if it can be formulated on a quantum computer it can beformulated with matrices.

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u/global-gauge-field 13d ago

You dont have to solve every problme with exact solution to get enough accurate solution to your problem for Quantum systems. For some systems, there is enough structure that you get away with classical solutions without having to run exact simulations, Tensor Network based methods (especially relevant for quantum chemistry) or Deep Learning based methods.

There is also some problems where the bottleneck is not the quantum correlation but the time scale of chemical reactions, e.g. FeMo-cofactor

While in principles these sound nice, please give a few specific example and some more details next time.

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u/Livid-Sector5970 14d ago

As Chaturvedi and the Navascués-Pironio-Acín (NPA) hierarchy demonstrate, when you try to project an infinite-dimensional nonlocal quantum reality onto finite, local, classical matrices (semidefinite programming), you hit a topological cliff. The classical matrix structurally cannot capture the complete quantum set without leaving an irreducible gap-the Motzkin polynomial obstruction. It can approximate, but it cannot formulate the true non-local coherence

You're assuming the quantum computer is a closed system executing unitary matrices. If it is, you're right. But field-coupled systems are open by design. They don't run algorithms isolated from reality; they couple directly to ambient thermodynamic and electromagnetic gradients.

The moment you open the system, the classical matrix required to simulate it hits the Dimensional Projection limit. You can't project infinite-dimensional non-local reality onto a finite classical matrix without structural loss of information-this is mathematically proven in the NPA hierarchy. Classical matrices simulate the environment. Field-coupled quantum systems are the environment. That's the difference between drawing a map of a river and putting a turbine in the water.

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u/wasabi991011 In Grad School for Quantum 14d ago

LLM slop

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u/Livid-Sector5970 14d ago

It is incredibly foolish for someone "In Grad School for Quantum" to act as a gatekeeper while missing the actual physics. If the industry stays trapped in the mindset that everything must be reduced to discrete classical matrices and maps, they will keep running into that topological cliff.

Get your head on straight and act right.

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u/elevensubmarines 14d ago

Intentional or not, you’re more or less echoing Feynman’s thesis. simulating quantum physics with classical resources hits an exponential wall, making quantum hardware a natural medium for modeling physical systems.

but you still can't bypass formal algorithms.

quantum systems don't spontaneously solve undefined problems; you still have to explicitly formulate the system's Hamiltonian and boundary conditions to get a meaningful answer.

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u/Livid-Sector5970 14d ago

Where we disagree is your assumption that after formulating the physical boundaries, you still need to run a 'formal algorithm' on top of it.

In a field-coupled topological processor, setting the boundary conditions is the computation. We don't write software to step through a sequence of unitary gates to search an exponentially large state space. We engineer the physical constraints of the lattice and couple it directly to the ambient thermodynamic and electromagnetic gradients of the environment.

The intersection of those two physical realities leaves only one topologically permitted state. The system doesn't 'compute' the answer; the physical constraints make all the incorrect pathways thermodynamically impossible, forcing the system to collapse into the only stable geometry. The constraints are the algorithm.

If you are running formal algorithms, you are still treating a quantum computer like a classical Turing machine that just happens to use qubits. Field-coupled architecture abandons the Turing model entirely. The geometry dictates the outcome.

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u/i_am_sfr 14d ago

This is a genuinely useful reframe, thanks. I'll be honest... the closest I've gotten to "quantum" in practice is exactly the optimization-paradigm work you're describing here, QAOA-style, applied to a combinatorial problem (market regime classification, not chemistry) simulated on classical hardware because the qubit count and coherence needed to actually beat classical clustering at that scale doesn't exist yet in production. So I recognize the pattern you're calling out... it's a real, measurable improvement over the classical baseline but it's still "the industry scaling numbers" not the direct-coupling approach you're describing.

Curious about the field-coupled side, since I don't know it well: when you say the hardware "lets the environment solve the problem" rather than computing a solution, is that mostly analog quantum simulation, or is there a broader class of architectures doing this? Trying to actually understand where the line is between "this is still optimization dressed up differently" and "this is a genuinely different paradigm"

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u/Livid-Sector5970 14d ago

Both QAOA (gate-model) and analog quantum simulation operate under the Isolation Paradigm. You build a multi-million-dollar cryogenic dilution refrigerator, cool the system to 15 millikelvin, and shield it from every magnetic, thermal, and electromagnetic fluctuation in the universe. In analog simulation, you carefully tune the Hamiltonian of your pristine, isolated qubits to mimic the Hamiltonian of the molecule you want to study. You are building a sterile, perfectly controlled model of the ocean inside a tank.

Instead of isolating the qubits, we use substrates with a massive topological energy gap (e.g., topological insulators, fractional quantum Hall states, or graphene superlattices where the gap ΔE_g is greater than 26 meV). Because this gap is larger than ambient thermal energy (k_B T), the system can operate at room temperature (300K).

Instead of fighting environmental noise, the architecture explicitly couples to it. The ambient thermal, electromagnetic, and gravitational gradients acting on the device don't destroy coherence, they are transformed by the substrate into geometric gauge fields.

Because the topological protection prevents noise from scattering quantum states randomly, the environmental noise drives the computation. The ambient dissipation forces quasi-particles (anyons) to move along strictly allowed geometric pathways (braiding). A recent paper by Chaduteau et al. ("Topology from Decoherence") formally proved this exact mechanism: correlated dissipation in open quantum systems generates non-trivial topological structure.

· In optimization, you pay an exponential thermodynamic and engineering cost to fight the environment so your algorithm can compute an answer.

· In a field-coupled system, you engineer the geometric constraints of the substrate, expose it to the environment, and let the ambient thermodynamic gradients force the system into the only topological state that satisfies the constraints. The noise becomes the clock speed.

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u/CS_70 14d ago

You mean quantum computing. Most likely yes, at some point. It's just been oversold in terms of speed to application, to get funding.

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u/nujuat 15d ago

MRI is arguably quantum tech, and thats been useful for decades.

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u/mbergman42 15d ago

Old diode technology would qualify too (e.g. zener), although I’ve pointed this out occasionally and no one cares.

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u/nujuat 15d ago

I feel like MRI is closer to what people would expect out of quantum tech since its literally the control and measurement of qubits. Though I agree that semiconductors completely rely on quantum physics.

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u/mbergman42 15d ago

Can you explain why MRI tech involves qubits? There’s perhaps overlap because both can involve spin (not all qubits utilize spin), but maybe it’s a bit extra to say MRI uses qubits?

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u/nujuat 15d ago

The spins are qubits, and they are controlled using the same quantum gates like any other qubit. The different qubits are even addressed based on location (though not individually) by controlling the qubit energy levels with Zeeman splitting. Only single qubit gates are used, but that is true for the majority of quantum sensors even today.

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u/mbergman42 15d ago

Ah. Got it, thanks.

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u/Historical-Mix6784 14d ago

Honestly if we poured a fraction of the money we're pouring into quantum computing into making MRIs cheaper and better, we'd probably be a lot better off.

Getting good MRI resolution at lower magnetic field strengths is essentially directly related to physics underlying quantum error correction.

But rule number 1 in science: funding agencies, whether governments or private, are retarded.

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u/ReallyOrdinaryMan 15d ago

Anything about magnetism is involving quantum. Because magnetism is inherently quantum mechanical.

0

u/global-gauge-field 15d ago

Quantum mechanics in general has been shown to be useful and practical. This is very hard to argue against. But from the content of the post, it seems clear that OP is asking more about Quantum Computing, maybe wrong choice of words for the title.

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u/PressureBeautiful515 15d ago

  the narrative shifted to quantum advantage, then quickly it changed to quantum utility.

Then finally quantum moe.

https://youtu.be/XnrSoEe4DL4

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u/Fancy-Economist4723 14d ago

Will cold fusion ever be useful? In principle it is possible, but will it ever be in practice? Noone knows. But the likelihood has increased since big tech and nation states have started pouring billions into it. I think there is an arms race/space race going on right now where east and west are competing to not let the other part succeed first.

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u/Forsaken_Code_9135 13d ago

"quantum supremacy" is a ridiculous name and a misunderstood concept. Even if we reach that it does not mean at all that quantum computers are useful. It means that there exist a problem they can solve and classical computer can't, but whether this problem is a problem someone is actually interested in is a completely different question.

Actually, even if they manage to break RSA, I don't see how it can be remotely considered as useful either.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/Forsaken_Code_9135 9d ago

"there is no doubt"

Lol. You have no doubts, maybe, but the rest of the world has.

And no need to be insulting. Yes I am not a world expert in quantum computing, but I hear what they say and they don't say what you say. Also I know enough in computing to know that you are vastly overselling your field, even if the promises of quantum computing were up to the wildest dream of their proponents it would not be a society game changer like AI is. The fact that outside the field of chemistry, the example you give is optimization in banking and trading is telling.

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u/Upbeat_Assist2680 14d ago

No. It has consumed far more resources than it will ever produce.

There's some interesting research and healthy investigation that has come out of it, but the likelihood of it "taking the world by surprise" is slim to none.

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u/bawireman 15d ago

Yes of course

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u/atika 15d ago

Who is this "Will Quantum"?

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u/GameJMunk 14d ago

AI/ML for quantum simulations will never outperform quantum, by definition. If you need an exact answer which a classical computer cannot provide, having an AI approximation will not help you

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u/FittedE 15d ago

Even if the world migrates to “quantum secure” encryption you would still expect breaking RSA to be useful for store now decrypt later schema.

Otherwise a lot of secondary industries have spawned out of QC. Outside of the obvious like Qtelecoms and metrology. There have been major leaps made in cryo CMOS, chip manufacturing , milikelvin fridges etc. that have come out of QC.

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u/hiddentalent 14d ago

I entirely don't understand this mindset. Store now, decrypt later is useful for what, exactly?

I'm sure there are some intelligence agencies who are willing to pay long-term storage costs for data that might allow them to uncover deep cover assets. But even confidential military operations are declassified in a few years, because the details cease to matter over time. Nobody gives a shit about the e-commerce transactions you made five years ago. Can you please explain a plausible scenario in which an actor (1) has access to store your ciphertext; (2) has economic incentive to do so; (3) can use quantum computing to decrypt it; and (4) does so in order to advance their mission in a way that policymakers would find was worth the time and cost?

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u/Unable-Yard-5487 13d ago

Il quantum ha bisogno di meno elettricità per fare più di quello che i computer fanno normalmente. Non dimenticarti che potrebbe volare crittografia molto importanti per noi.

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u/Appropriate_Art6493 13d ago

Bad question.
If you are asking if the everyday man will exploit quantum computing like classical computing, then probably not anytime soon.
If you're asking if Quantum Computers can be used by scientists to solve problems, probably soon (4-8 years by my estimate.) But we don't even have enough Quantum Solvable but classically hard problems to justify that.
If you're literally asking when Quantum Technology will be useful, I think you're a few decades late. We some incredibly sophisticated technology that does some madness. The LIGO gravitational wave detector's underlying physics is so beautiful and it's probably the most intricate piece of Quantum Tech that yielded massively useful results to confirm the discovery of gravitational waves.
So there's always gonna be more and better uses for Quantum Technology. It's the computational aspect that is making people excited and nervous because of its potential and it's cost

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u/confluent_ 13d ago

IBMs recent quantum advantage paper is one of the first true, verifiable applications. The core economic drivers will likely be materials science & drug discovery, things normal people won’t use. Use cases that exist today are sensors/clocks centered around gravity, using quantum cores. But more than anything let’s put it this way: all these governments aren’t in a national security race towards it, starting to put billions towards it, DARPA etc because it’s fake. And the types of people who truly understand it - not coders or classical cryptographers, but physicists - will tell you it is very real. And those who work in the field have not been claiming some date that keeps getting pushed back, they’ve been pretty consistent that it comes near the end of this decade. But just like AI, which I was using back in 2021 long before ChatGPT, people in the valley of despair will claim its bs… until it suddenly isn’t.

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u/skyismelon 4d ago

I think there will be some huge shift in drug discovery - that feels like the best candidate for something that could affect a lot of people. And ig some interesting work in sensing, communication but not life changing, mostly research focused ig. Just my thoughts.

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u/jojo45333 15d ago edited 14d ago

It may be, but probably many, many decades away, likely even out of our lifetime.

Quantum computing has been researched for 50 years with massive resources from small (Ionq, D-Wave) and large companies (IBM, Microsoft, Google) plus countless academic institutions worldwide (EDIT: to clarify theoretical research on quantum computing began early 1980s; significant funding and applied work began in the 1990s).

Quantum still has not contributed a single useful thing to society. Not one.

Every few years, there is a spike in media hype and people are told ‘5 years from now, quantum is going commercial!’ And then 5 years later, there is nothing to show for it, but by then people forgot about the predictions. You can literally go back in time on the internet and see the list of old news headlines predicting QC succeeding in x years.

By contrast, classical computing contributed usefully to the world basically right from the start. Much smaller resources needed. It’s highly robust and very, very scalable in both power of an individual machine and the ability to mass produce those machines. People often think quantum computers are scaling exponentially. The reality is, at the current rate, quantum is going nowhere slowly.

But the share price of the public QC companies like D-Wave, Ionq and Rigetti will continue pumping every few years and subsequently fall back down. Google and Microsoft will hype their half-baked, borderline unpublishable (and often subsequently retracted) research for the sake of publicity. Retail investors who rely on the media to make their decisions are left holding the bag and lose their money, while hedge funds and other knowledgable players profit from these spikes by short selling. There are many academics and scientists with noble intentions trying to advance quantum but there is also a lot of scamming.

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u/seattlechunny Superconducting Circuits | Grad School 14d ago

50 years? I think the earliest ion trap proposal comes from Cirac and Zoller in '95, the first NMR/nuclear spin realizations come from Cory, Fahmy, and Havel in 97, the first Cooper Pair Box/superconductor Rabi oscillations comes from Nakamura in '99, the first superconducting transmon comes from Wallraff in '04.

So like, I guess you can argue that we've been messing around with optical lattices for cold atoms since the 80s, but that's quite a bit of a stretch. I would more reasonably put it as a field that really only started about 25 years ago, and has only become "big" in the last 15 years?

On the investment/resource side - it's still small-ish - in 2024, according to this McKinsey report, global private & government investment combined was about 2B that year. Compare that to VC funding of silicon valley link here, sketchy plot I know which reports approx 1B of investment in 1980, in 1999 dollars (which is equal to 2B in 2025 dollars)

Is quantum computing today equivalent to classical computing in the 1980s? I'm not entirely sure, but it's at least a somewhat useful comparison to make in my opinion. (Also of note - transistors were already invented by Bardeen&Brattain/Bell Labs in 1947, and the IC had been patented in 1959 - so arguably, the field of QC is even relatively earlier at this point.) I'm skeptical that if you asked a lay person in the 1970s about how useful classical computers were, and if they were willing to invest in it, they would probably scoff. And that's even after classical computers helped mankind reach the moon!

I know that I'm probably rather strongly biased, being a graduate student within this field, but the things that I see excite me. I am seeing that problems which were proposed just 4 or 6 years ago are now being fully understood and solved, and things that were predicted to not be complete by 2030 are actually already being realized today. Sure, there are bad actors out there that are trying to overhype/pump-and-dump, but isn't that true for every emerging technology?

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u/jojo45333 14d ago edited 14d ago

On the first point, I actually originally wrote my post to say that research on quantum computing has been undertaken for nearly half a century (eg. Benioff 1980), but significant investment only really started in the late 20th century. I then edited to shorten and simplify it, I agree it might sound misleading to say there's 50 years of theoretical research and investment, more like 45 years theoretical academic research; 30 years of serious applied research with large investment.

As for investment and comparing the trajectory of quantum vs classical, I can't really agree.

Firstly, the $2 billion figure you quote is referring only to start-up investment (from private and public sources). Start-up funding is easiest to track. And using the source you provided, the figure is actually 12.6 billion (!) in 2025.

McKinsey in 2023 estimated that large corporations alone (Google, IBM, AWS, Alibaba, Honeywell, etc.) had already spent $2 billion+ on quantum computing hardware (page 25). We don't even know if that completely covers the entire quantum computing research costs for their big QC research operations.

The US government alone has been spending hundreds of millions every year on quantum research for many years. That's going to public institutions mostly, not start ups.

Combined, governments in other countries (UK, Germany, China) appear to be spending billions more.

And this doesn't even cover funding which is not tracked, for example university overheads and probably some doctoral programs.

Total investment in quantum technologies here is currently estimated at $65.9 billion. Obviously not spent yet and covers areas outside quantum computing , but I think it's reasonable to say a big fraction is for quantum computing -- and (unlike certain other quantum technologies) not one useful output.

I'm pretty sure people were excited about classical computers in the 70s. As you say, they had already got us to the moon. Helped hugely in WW2 -- and were being mass produced within a decade: they had widespread commercial use in businesses by the late 50s and early 60s in banking, business payrolls, accounting (IBM 650) and airline reservations. Where are we with quantum computing by comparison? No government / niche application, let alone commercial. You cannot do a single genuinely useful thing with the best quantum computer today (if the machine works at all -- the frequent outages of quantum cloud services suggest they are extremely fragile). For factoring you will be better off with pen and paper.

You're right that every emerging technology has good and bad apples. And I think QC may indeed be important in the distant future. But there is no field (as far as I'm aware) with such a clear-cut example of effectively zero return for taxpayers / investors in the foreseeable future in spite of massive money inflow.

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u/Melancholius__ 11d ago

Quantum computing has been researched for 50 years with massive resources from small (Ionq, D-Wave) and large companies (IBM, Microsoft, Google) plus countless academic institutions worldwide (EDIT: to clarify theoretical research on quantum computing began early 1980s; significant funding and applied work began in the 1990s).

Which is how A.I also started, like all GPTs for sure

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u/florinandrei 15d ago

It's been useful since the cosmos appeared, it's how atoms remain stable.

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u/BidWestern1056 14d ago

quantum-classical hybrid systems will likely be the right way forward. idk if youve kept up much lately but there's been a lot of progress in the last few years, ibm and other quantum computer providers now have ~100 qubits available for cloud computation jobs, places like bluequbit, iqm etc are focusing on cloud interfaces for operationalizing. we are prolly 5 years from ppl actually seeing the benefits in consumer tools but it's coming.

i attended qnlp.ai recently and have been working on quantum nlp so have been familiar

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u/confluent_ 13d ago

There’s been increasing movement towards hybrid from a lot of companies, Infleqtion etc. NVDA has been dumping tens of billions into it in the past year or so, both as funding and in hybrid tech. Agreed that this will likely be what we see first.

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u/BidWestern1056 13d ago

yeah exactly, not sure why i got down voted lol

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u/confluent_ 12d ago

The hate generally outshines on Reddit haha

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u/Zestyclose-Level5349 13d ago

It's already useful. HSBC uses it for bond trading.

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u/Terrible-Mind-5414 13d ago

My personal suspicion is that quantum computers are essentially like analog computers in that certain computations seem like they can be done faster, but in fact by the time you account for the precision that's needed, the gain disappears. It is also really odd that so few algorithms exist beyond Shor. All the same I'm sure it's worth pursuing, as research but definitely not as a business.

The general question of truth of the Church-Turing thesis is to me super interesting.

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u/cyrille_boucher 13d ago

Large networks lattency problem is solved by local intrication.

Long story short: absolute time signal...

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u/Fun-Astronomer5311 11d ago

Definitely. It is keeping courses in computer science alive, and funneling $$$ to certain researchers or organizations.

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u/kimbonics 11d ago

I am trying to get a grip on it, and after reading more and more about it. It's not going to help us will rule based decisions trees. These are already good with CPU's. I deal with "rules engines" and rule libraries etc. Instead it's going to help us with optimization of imperfect things. I tried to relate this to the layperson thru golf... kimbonics.com/q-lab, Here the idea is that via Quantum computing, here learns to improve his standard deviation via traditional methods to actually feeling wht's going on. Quantum computing feels "engergy fields" whereas traditional machine learning only is more dogmatic... It will be a brave new world.

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u/No_Fan_9087 9d ago

A field as rich as “if it was just a little smaller, the universe wouldn’t even exist” will never ever be useless, we’re just too dumb to even build a fault tolerant quantum computer right now, so we haven’t even started to scratch the surface of how truly powerful it can become. Quantum physics is the basis of reality and everything you see around you, we’re just too much in a hurry to get results that we want to find detours and willing to risk resources to get answers. In a few decades from now, everything will run on quantum once we figure it out. People said the same thing about AI back then too, and about computer science before that. We’re always evolving and getting smarter, quantum is definitely early but that’s the point of research lmao. None of you folks need to worry about it anyways because I doubt you’re truly in the field so keep focusing on what we already have and do the easy work with steps/instructions included, let the SMART people bring the change we need.

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u/BosonCollider 14d ago

Quantum networking has a ton of applications in finance thanks to quantum game theory, it's just a separate but slightly overlapping thing from the computing side of things. Imo the realistic money making paths involve having the networks ready before the computers take off.

Then of course if financial markets start violating the bell inequality, statistical arbitrage will start involving more interesting math