>The computer is (said to be) live and in use by companies, so cryogenic cooling keeps the system temperature as close to absolute zero as possible to conserve that precious quantum state.
Before LLMs/AI became the obvious "next big thing in computing" I remember coming across a fair number of opportunistic devs on LinkedIn trying to promote themselves as "quantum software engineers", and even a just a year or two ago I would see "quantum machine learning" on people's profiles. I remember thinking maybe I had missed something and seeing how many qubits we could even have... needless to say it was (and still is) not enough for any meaningful ML work quite yet.
If you search you can still find some, and, as someone who has spent more than a decade doing actual machine learning, I find the audacity to claim that you're doing any kind of serious software engineering, let along proper ML work, on a quantum computer to be almost impressively audacious.
As a fellow currently dipping my toes into quantum machine learning, I think that you think we're saying "machine learning on quantum hardware", when what we actually mean is "machine learning for quantum computing on classical hardware". That is, using machine learning on classical computers to try to increase the effectiveness of quantum hardware.
I know a couple of quantum software engineers and these people are in universities writing novel algorithms on whiteboards (and sometimes testing them out in QuPy).
Probably just marketing wank, but I got a chuckle out of "it’s not likely to be something you’ll ever have at home" as if we haven't all heard that before.
This is consistent with IBM's history of putting computers doing customers' work on display. I am aware of the company doing so in New York and Toronto.
They also have one displayed at the Cleveland Clinic main campus _cafeteria_
Imo focusing in “showing off” instead of “providing value” is a bit of a product-smell. Maybe thats just the point tho, IBM seems to prioritize impressing C-suites over actually accomplishing anything
It’s not unheard of in the medical realm. Slightly different but when Intuitive Surgical released their DaVinci robotic surgery platforms, a hospital system I worked with was early on their list. They also set up the demo unit in the cafeteria so you could see surgeons peeling oranges and then stitching them back up or what not.
Back in the early 2000s I worked for Cap Gemini in Birmingham England which had a part of the office that was some sort of partnership with IBM GS(I think IBM did the hardware and cap got the services contacts). They also had a big blinkin lights server setup in the middle of the office for clients to see. As a teenage geek in his first tech job I used to love going to peek at it even though I did tape rotation on the real servers in the basement most days.
It's also consistent with IBM's history of just putting what they considered important computers from history on display in their offices.
When I post doc'd at TJW I know they had a big museum like display in the lobby (But this was years ago, who knows if its still there), with ibm computers from history, but also things like babbage's and the like.
We'd need to know how to build a useful quantum computer, find a useful algorithm to run on it (factoring large primes lacks broad consumer appeal), and use this demand to fund research into a way to reduce manufacturing and running costs to reasonable levels.
Readit News
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But can it factors 21? [1]
[1] Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082587
If you search you can still find some, and, as someone who has spent more than a decade doing actual machine learning, I find the audacity to claim that you're doing any kind of serious software engineering, let along proper ML work, on a quantum computer to be almost impressively audacious.
Dead Comment
Imo focusing in “showing off” instead of “providing value” is a bit of a product-smell. Maybe thats just the point tho, IBM seems to prioritize impressing C-suites over actually accomplishing anything
When I post doc'd at TJW I know they had a big museum like display in the lobby (But this was years ago, who knows if its still there), with ibm computers from history, but also things like babbage's and the like.
Theres even a python package called quisket.
https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/
> "It’s not likely to be something you’ll ever have at home"
I’m curious… what would need to be true to make this statement wrong?
Alternatively we all move in to science labs.