dougfinke

To see a glimpse of how quantum computers will be programmed in the future, do the following: Open ChatGPT on your computer Ask ChatGPT: Write a Qiskit program that learns a 20-bit string encoded in an oracle Repeat, substituting your preferred Quantum SDK language (CIRQ, TKET, Q#, PennyLane, etc.) for Qiskit. A big prediction for the classical world is that most of the classical computer code written in a few years will be created by AI. This was recently expressed by Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and many others. If you think this will [...]

D-Wave recently held its annual Qubits Conference to an audience of a few hundred in-person attendees live and many hundreds more viewing by video. The general mood was upbeat with the company management providing an update on their technical roadmap and also a large number of sessions including talks from over a dozen end users about their projects. We will report on some of the highlights including details they revealed about their development roadmap and additional comments describing some of the other strengths the company has for providing a complete, easy-to-use, offering to their customers. Quantum Annealing Hardware Roadmap D-Wave has [...]

Introduction The quantum technology landscape has evolved rapidly in Q1 2025, with significant developments across major ecosystems worldwide. This analysis integrates key advancements to date with critical watchpoints for the remainder of the year. United States DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) has made substantial progress with Microsoft and PsiQuantum advancing to Stage C validation in February 2025. The program expanded dramatically on April 3, 2025, when DARPA announced 15 new companies selected for Stage A contracts, with three more pending finalization, bringing the total of new awardees to 18. Stage A contracts involve a six-month "sprint" for companies to develop plans [...]

DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), launched in July 2024, aims to identify and verify approaches for building fault-tolerant quantum computers that can achieve utility-scale operation, meaning its computational value exceeds its cost by 2033. Eighteen quantum computing companies have entered Stage A of the program, where they will provide detailed technical concepts over six months to show feasibility for creating utility-scale quantum systems. Funding for Stage A will be up to $1 million per company and the questions that a company will need to answer during Stage A include: How does your company want to build their quantum computer? Why will [...]

Contributed article by Parham Pashaei, Director of Quantum Solutions, Strategy & Partnerships, Quantum Algorithms Institute It’s no secret that the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasing worldwide, but that comes at a cost that not many of us are thinking about: energy consumption and CO2 emissions. For example, each ChatGPT query consumes nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search and produces approximately 4.32 grams of CO2. As the AI industry searches for more sustainable and efficient ways to consume energy, quantum computers offer several solutions which the world should consider tomake AI energy consumption more efficient and [...]

As organizations look to upgrade their IT infrastructure to make their communications quantum safe, one of the approaches is to implement a hybrid classical/quantum approach. This combines together both classical algorithms with quantum algorithms to provide added protection against attacks against both the classical and quantum public key encryption. This significantly increases the difficulty for an attacker because they would need to break both the algorithms before they could get access to the encryption key. To this end, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has launched a new post-quantum security standard, Efficient Quantum-Safe Hybrid Key Exchanges with Hidden Access Policies (ETSI TS 104 015), to [...]

Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI) has announced its Q4 2024 and full year 2024 financial results. A summary of key financial metrics comparing Q4 2024 with Q3 2024 as well as the full year comparison of 2024 versus 2023 is shown in the table below. The company significantly improved it's cash position in 2024. By the end of the year, the company had raised $167.8 million through its issuance of common stock and $20.1 million through its issuance of convertible promissory notes and other debt for a total of $187.9 million. Operational highlights include NASA collaborations for quantum remote sensing and phase unwrapping, [...]

Diagrams explaining the LR-QAOA Benchmarking Process - See originals at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06471 A team from the Julich Supercomputing Centre, AIDAS, RWTH Aachen University, and Purdue University has released a paper that describes a new quantum benchmarking protocol called Linear Ramp Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (LR-QAOA) which they tested on 19 different QPUs from five vendors: IBM, IQM, IonQ,Quantinuum, and Rigetti for problem sizes requiring from Nq = 5 to Nq = 156 qubits. The tests included three different qubit topologies, 1D-chain, native layout, and fully connected graphs, qubit counts that ranged from 5 to 156, and LR-QAOA layer count (parameter p) that [...]

Microsoft's release in February of a technical paper on Nature as well as a post of a pre-print paper discussing Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays on arXiv has generated a lot of discussion amongst quantum physicists and others on the viability of this approach. In order to provide additional information about their work on this technology, Dr. Chetan Nayak gave a presentation at the recent APS 2025 conference in Anaheim, California with supplementary data that provides further insight into Microsoft's work. Later that day, GQI sat down with Dr. Nayak to further discuss this technology and, [...]

Making the Business Case for Quantum Computing Overview In this episode of The Quantum Spin by HKA, host Veronica Combs talks with Elena Yndurain, a professor, business leader and author. She teaches at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain and specializes in the practical application of theory in Quantum, Artificial Intelligence, SaaS, and more. She created the first Quantum Computing curriculum for executives. In her new book, she analyzed four use cases in 11 industries. She and Veronica discuss working for startups, moving beyond early adopters, and making relevant use cases for quantum technology. Here is the link to her new [...]