> The cynicism stems from people telling others that practical quantum computers will change the world for at least a decade.
Practical quantum computers will change the world (break RSA 2048). The question is "when". The people who have a timeline of ~10 years instead of decades contribute to what we in our community call "Quantum hype" and it's very much frowned upon by most of the members in the community.
> combines Quantum computing with the current hot thing
The founder of this lab has an illustrious career in machine learning and is now researching how quantum computers can help with that.
Breaking RSA changes the world by breaking crypto and implicitly by moving protocols to post-quantum crypto, which is already happening https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/.
I'm aware I'm replying to a comment that doesn't add anything substantive to this conversation, but the quantum AI lab is very serious research effort https://quantumai.google/research.
> I wonder if they put "AI" in the branding to grab the attention of people in quantum about to pivot to LLM's..
The Quantum AI lab was founded in 2013, about a decade before LLM's took off. The founder of the lab is researching how quantum can be applied to AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEEvRfTTEs
> It is still open whether we can build quantum computers with sufficiently low noise to run Shor‘s algorithm.
This statement should delimit between theory and experiment.
Theoretically, the question of building a quantum computer with low enough noise to run Shor's has been solved. In fact it was solved by Shor himself in the 1990s: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9605011.
Experimentally, it will always be open whether a quantum computer can run Shor's until it actually run Shor's. The point is that progress in the field has not stagnated since it's founding.
That paper of Shor just shows how a quantum computer with a large number of bad qubits can be the equivalent of a quantum computer with a small number of good qubits.
The paper does not prove anything about the upper limit for the number of bad qubits that are physically realisable.
There are doubts that this upper limit, which is unknown yet, is high enough for most practical applications.
> The paper does not prove anything about the upper limit
Nothing can prove how many qubits can be realizable except trying to realize them. There will never be a theorem that says "The maximum number of qubits that can ever be controlled in a lab is X". That's what experiment is for.
I will say, it's difficult to doubt that the upper limit to the number of qubits we can realize is infinity. We can now trap ~10 million atoms and efficiently control hundreds of them: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06927-3. The question is not "Could we ever realize billions of qubits?". It's "When can we realize billions qubits?". The answer could be decades or centuries but as long as people are building these devices, it will happen eventually.
Yeah well you can rephrase my statement to say that the theory underlying quantum computers still hasn’t been validated experimentally, so it’s still open whether it models reality sufficiently well to allow us to run the algorithms it predicts on physical machines.
> In contrast this effort is trying to imagine and monetize GPS before relativity is discovered.
The theory of relativity was discovered decades before GPS. Similarly, the theory of quantum computing was discovered in the 1990s.
I agree with the sentiment: trying to find applications for a technology (Large fault tolerant quantum computer) that doesn't exist yet. I just think relativity is the wrong comparison. I do not think that this effort if not worth it due to not having fault tolerant quantum computers. Theory alone can take one very far.
