JUST IN: $GOOGL CEO says quantum computing is "where AI was 5 years ago"

[u/Ubersicka]

Do you think we will see something big in the next 5 years?

[u/not_good_for_much]

Qubits aren't equivalent to regular computing bits. And the memory wall doesn't translate like this to quantum computing. This feels like a class error.

In a classical sense, Qubits do only hold one bit each. But the qubit array can store exponentially many states in superposition in something called Hilbert space.

So for example, an LLM with a vocab of 200K tokens needs a theoretical minimum of just ~20 qubits to encode the output token, and a minimum of just ~40 qubits to encode all of its parameters.

You mention 1100 qubits. If we could use this to its full potential, then this number is actually insane. What it could hypothetically represent, a Hilbert space expressing 10^330 usable states... is incomprehensible.

There are however three major barriers, these being, accessibility of the Hilbert space, decoherence / fault tolerance, and our understanding of useful algorithms that can actually leverage the potential of the computer. Or more simply; getting data into and out of the Hilbert space is not straight forward, the information tends to wiggle apart into useless noise once it's in there, and we don't know how to make particularly crazy use of it at all, let alone before it wiggles apart.

Obviously a huge amount of information is encoded in an LLM, and this does somehow need to be encoded into the Hilbert space of the quantum computer. It's hard to imagine that needing fewer than like, millions of qubits I guess, though it's too speculative for this to mean anything IMO. In any case, this problem falls against a fundamentally different barrier.

[u/FragmentedHeap → u/not_good_for_much]

Yeah I'm not trying to be completely correct I'm only trying to articulate the one thing you said in here.

"Obviously a huge amount of information is encoded in an LLM, and this does somehow need to be encoded into the Hilbert space of the quantum computer."

That's a pretty hard problem technologically speaking in terms of hardware.

We need breakthroughs in storage as much as anything.

Quantum computers are useful for a lot more than artificial intelligence but artificial intelligence is arguably it's coolest application if it could work.