Quantum leap: preparing for the next generation of computing tech

Even though quan­tum com­put­ing is in its nascent phase, the promise of the tech­nol­o­gy remains undis­put­ed: a prob­lem that takes the most pow­er­ful clas­si­cal com­put­er today hun­dreds of thou­sands of years to solve, a uni­ver­sal, fault-tol­er­ant quan­tum com­put­er would be able to solve with­in a mat­ter of hours or days.

But there still needs to be a big leap in sci­ence and engi­neer­ing before we can har­ness the quan­tum advan­tage – the inflec­tion point at which quan­tum com­put­ers can solve prob­lems that clas­si­cal com­put­ers can­not. While this advan­tage has been proven in a research set­ting, indus­try appli­ca­tions still have some way to go.

There are sev­er­al rea­sons for that. There is a lot of work to be done on the qual­i­ty of quan­tum bits or ‘qubits’ them­selves. Their very nature makes them rather frag­ile and sus­cep­ti­ble to exter­nal inter­fer­ence. Cur­rent­ly, it takes 10,000 qubits to sta­bilise and use a sin­gle qubit for com­pu­ta­tion­al pur­pos­es. Then there is the issue of scal­a­bil­i­ty. To see an advan­tage, we would need a quan­tum com­put­er with at least 500 to 1,000 qubits, but we’re yet to reach this mile­stone.

Why, then, are we talk­ing about quan­tum com­put­ing today? And what are the reper­cus­sions, if any, both for CTOs and oth­er indus­try lead­ers who might still be sit­ting on the fence about it?

While major efforts are under­way by gov­ern­ments and quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy providers to achieve a quan­tum advan­tage in an indus­tri­al set­ting, experts also see a great push by indus­try end-users to under­stand the tech­nol­o­gy and steer its evo­lu­tion.

Early adopters

This is down to sev­er­al fac­tors. A break­through can hap­pen at any time and sev­er­al of them have already occurred ahead of sched­ule. Anoth­er ele­ment that adds urgency to the issue is sim­ply the lim­it­ed resources both in tal­ent and quan­tum machines. Christophe Jur­czak, man­ag­ing part­ner at the ven­ture cap­i­tal fund Quan­to­na­tion, believes that a squeeze in demand is inevitable. “Now’s the right time to look at the tech­nol­o­gy before quan­tum advan­tage is proven. The chal­lenge here is that the day we iden­ti­fy one or sev­er­al use cas­es that are worth run­ning on quan­tum com­put­ers, there won’t be enough machines,” he com­ments.

He says that today there are no more than 100 machines glob­al­ly and those who have estab­lished rela­tion­ships with ven­dors will ben­e­fit first. Every­one else would have to wait. This wait, thinks Matt Lan­gione, a part­ner at Boston Con­sult­ing Group, can have exis­ten­tial reper­cus­sions for busi­ness­es.

“The oppor­tu­ni­ty cost for not invest­ing in quan­tum could be exis­ten­tial. Imag­ine a phar­ma com­pa­ny that can search the entire rel­e­vant span of chem­i­cal space. With a quan­tum com­put­er, once it comes online, they could sim­ply dis­cov­er all sorts of drugs, patent them and effec­tive­ly cor­ner the mar­ket, clear­ing the field of com­peti­tors,” he explains. “Quan­tum com­put­ing has the poten­tial to be, if not win­ner-takes-all, a win­ner-takes-most kind of tech­nol­o­gy.”

Jur­czak, who also has a PhD in quan­tum physics, explains that despite the mas­sive poten­tial of the tech­nol­o­gy, it would be naive to think that quan­tum com­put­ers would be the panacea to all our com­pu­ta­tion­al prob­lems. Instead, exec­u­tives would ben­e­fit from keep­ing an open mind and see­ing how the tech­nol­o­gy works in syn­er­gy with oth­er approach­es for best results.

Andrew Fore­man, the for­mer CTO for the US Army Europe and Africa, echoes this, hav­ing looked at quan­tum com­put­ing right before his retire­ment last year. He has reflect­ed on how it may work along­side oth­er tech­nolo­gies, like AI and machine learn­ing. “As a CTO, when I look at prob­lem-solv­ing and specif­i­cal­ly at emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies, I’m look­ing at what they can pro­duce in the five- to 10-year mark, not in the near term,” he com­ments. To look beyond the hype, he empha­sis­es the need to talk to dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers both in indus­try and acad­e­mia.

“You can’t just go to a sin­gle source and ask where we are going to be in five years because they’re going to tell you what suits them. When I look at emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies, I reach out to about five or six dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies and look for where these over­laps come togeth­er,” he says.

Stakeholder buy-in

The final step is to ral­ly all your stake­hold­ers behind the idea. For this, you need to lay out a phased plan that will clear­ly demon­strate the busi­ness ben­e­fits at dif­fer­ent mile­stones.

Lan­gione reck­ons that we’d be able to prove the quan­tum advan­tage in an indus­tri­al set­ting some­time between 2023 and 2025 which can pro­duce around $5bn (£4.4bn) in val­ue for end users. Between 2025 and 2030, the indus­try would look at scal­ing the vol­ume of qubits, which is expect­ed to pro­duce $20bn to $50bn in added val­ue. Once we crack error cor­rec­tion, which Google esti­mates will hap­pen by the end of this decade, we can unlock expo­nen­tial gains in the realm of hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars.

Both Jur­czak and Lan­gione see finance as the indus­try which stands to ben­e­fit first, although Jur­czak also sees great poten­tial in chem­istry espe­cial­ly when it comes to drug and mate­r­i­al design. Lan­gione, on the oth­er hand, sees auto­mo­tive and aero­space as the run­ner-up indus­tries fol­lowed by oil and gas and ener­gy. He says that any busi­ness that faces a large sparse matrix prob­lem can cap­i­talise on advances in quan­tum.

The world is data hun­gry, so much so that clas­si­cal com­put­ers are com­ing to a stand­still in their capac­i­ty to process it. Quan­tum com­put­ing is offer­ing a much-need­ed help­ing hand, but the tech­nol­o­gy needs time to mature.

That said, any­one who isn’t look­ing at the tech­nol­o­gy today risks being left behind tomor­row. Time esti­mates are a rough guide when we are in such unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ries. Here, play­ing the wait­ing game can mean play­ing the los­ing game. Whether you’re look­ing to gain a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage or sim­ply pro­tect your IT infra­struc­ture from future encryp­tion vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, experts agree that now is the time to look at quan­tum.