14 ms·

Quantum computing hype is bad for science

136 points by nkurz 5y ago

okareaman 5y ago
The AI winter didn't seem to hurt AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
- bitwize 5y ago
  The AI field pre-winter has been obliterated by the winter. What is now called AI are the parts of the field that got less attention and funding back in the day, mainly prediction by statistical analysis of past data.
- mcguire 5y ago
  The AI winter of the 1980s destroyed quite a few careers. Many of the TAs when I was an undergrad graduated into that winter.
  - yourenotsmart 5y ago
    It destroyed many people's careers, but it didn't destroy AI. There's a difference.
    - sgt101 5y ago
      It destroyed a particular vision of AI - that of Knowledge Engineering.
      - yourenotsmart 5y ago
        I'd say "not so fast".
- sampo 5y ago
  AI is very useful, even if the pioneers had to give up on the dream of human-level or human-like intelligence. There is quantum cryptography, but other than that I find it hard to find practical value for quantum computers before they reach the limit, maybe around 80 qubits fit for general computation, that they start to be faster than classical computers. Faster for solving meaningful problems, not useless problems designed for the quantum computer to solve fast.
deleted 5y ago
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smoldesu 5y ago
The hype around QC is going to be essential in getting more people interested. If we can encourage people to learn the concepts of entropy, state and other fundamentals while their minds are still plastic, I say go for it! This article has a very elitist tone, which I can mostly forgive because of the subject matter. Hell, I even understand where they're coming from with regards to how poorly AI was marketed/integrated into our modern workflows. However, I think the conjecture that you're reaching is that 'transparency matters', which is true (albeit not particularly profound). The best solution that I can imagine is ensuring that the next generation of programmers has access to quantum runtimes.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  Why do more people need to be interested? Why do we need to ensure access to quantum computers to programmers? Seriously, any programmer can fire up a quantum simulator for any number of the quantum instruction languages and be more productive than with a real quantum computer. Because of the hype, we’ve all been led to believe that we are “ready” to program quantum machines and we just need to train more people through boot camps, hackathons, and summer schools. It’s simply not true. The quantum computers of today are programmable (barely), and the programs do run (though you can only run a dozen or so “statements” before you get junk results), but they’re so wildly bad compared to what you’d expect out of a textbook that you easily conclude “the scientists have work to do”. Scientists do have more work to do, but it seems like every month there’s a perfectly respected scientist who gets a $15MM series A and starts spouting the same misinforming junk that quantum computing is going to help FedEx with logistics, or steel mills with operations planning. Then they hire a bunch of good academic people, pay them software-engineer salaries, and string them along to help them perpetuate the fundraising machine—not by actually doing science of course—hoping to also have a quantum computer/software/applications/algorithms be built as a by-product. Money is very attractive to people, especially physicists who frequently find themselves jumping ship for an alternative, higher-paying career. There must be around 100 quantum companies now, most of them startups, and—to my knowledge—zero of them providing anything demonstrated to be a valuable commercial product. Some of them are definitely doing good work here and there, but in the bigger picture, the profit motive—whether shareholder value or venture capital returns—consistently undermines their ability to do research.
gadders 5y ago
Things that are always 10 years away: [1] Those aeroplanes that can fly from London to Australia in 2 hours [2] Cold Fusion [3] Quantum computing
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  Cold fusion is still a hypothesis. As for that airplane ride, I dunno who was selling you that. What kind of fuel would the jet even use? Quantum Computing though is already here, it's just not practical for much outside of a lab setting.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    QC is here in theory, but it is not practical for anything - the experiments so far were only intended to prove that the thing was an actual quantum computer in the complexity theory sense. But it is impossible to actually use Google's device or the one in China to compute anything at all, even something like factoring 4 using Shor's algorithm is beyond the current capabilities. There is perhaps some more debate about D-Wave's device,both its status as a QC and its usefulness.
- gswdh 5y ago
  Don’t forget solid state batteries.
- chki 5y ago
  The distance from London to Sydney is 17.000km. The current flight airspeed record is 3.500km/h. I would doubt that anything close to 8.500km/h is physically possible without using rockets. That's the speed of the fastest missile.
  - mrhyyyyde 5y ago
    The X-15 has recorded 7,274 km/h airspeeds. I'm no airspeed record expert but did some reading.
    - 5y ago
ssivark 5y ago
That this is a post on LinkedIn shouldn’t take away from the important points it is making :-) As a physicist who knows a little bit about quantum computing, my understanding is that we’re far far away from building usable quantum computers (it’s still at an applied research stage, and nowhere close to “just an engineering/design problem”) — all hype be damned.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  I like to tell people that actual, programmable quantum computers do exist (which is a very important point—they’re not vaporware), but exactly like you say, in order to make them useful and scalable, more “actual science” needs to happen.
  - xondono 5y ago
    They really don’t though. We have some things that if you squint a little, and are willing to stretch the words, look like a quantum computer.
    - reikonomusha 5y ago
      They really do, and there are mountains of published experiments unambiguously verifying such.
      - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
        They "exists" in the same sense a hydraulic computer exists because I plumbed 5 valves at my house.
    - anon_tor_12345 5y ago
      they do and you can get time on one (5 qubits) right now https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/files/new https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/files/new if you don't think these are computers then you just don't know what a computer really is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_(computer_science) they're not useful at all but they're still real actual unadulterated computers.
pphysch 5y ago
All hype is "bad" for science. Hype implies emotional investment or faith in an expectation, and science is specifically about challenging expectations (i.e. hypotheses) via practical experimentation. There is plenty of experimental research, and early practical results, being achieved in quantum computing. There is also lots of snake oil being peddled by sleazy entrepreneurs. This is true for all developing fields.
- yourenotsmart 5y ago
  Is it though? Hype causes people not familiar or well informed into the matter to get into it, hoping for big returns. Of course, they'll come out severely disappointed, but science and technology as a whole would have advanced, thanks to their efforts. Going blind into something with a lot of hype is often an "ice-breaker" for humanity into new areas of study.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    The article talks about this in good detail and why hype leads to: 1. Brain drain of talent 2. Ponzi schemes 3. Damage to the reputation of science
superjan 5y ago
If you have an hour to spare and are interested in what quantum computers might be good for in the long run, I recommend this interview(podcast, Sean Carrol’s Mindscape): https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/06/28/153-john-preskill-on-quantum-computers-and-what-theyre-good-for/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/06/28/153-...
AlexCoventry 5y ago
The hype is bad in its own right, but it's a symptom of how science is being funded and rewarded, which is a much bigger problem.
briantakita 5y ago
The Science industry is built on using buzzwords to get research $$$. Probably the same with most industries that reach a certain institutional scale. Institutional involvement leads to politics which leads to buzzwords & right-speak. Another case of "for the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil".
tus89 5y ago
coughmachine learningcough
- qayxc 5y ago
  There's absolutely no comparing the two fields. ML already has a massive impact on industry and society as a whole. The future of many careers will forever be altered even by current ML application, let alone future developments. From automated face recognition, to customer service, job interviews, risk assessment and protein folding, ML has become part of our daily lives already to varying degrees (of both impact and success). It's a field that won't go away and will only grow and probably change quite a bit in the next decades. Admittedly we're far from a Butlerian Jihad-situation, but there's no denying that ML is much more than just hype. AGI, now that's a different story.
  - tester756 5y ago
    interviews? Oo cv scanning?
    - qayxc 5y ago
      CV scanning is old news. Nowadays even language skills are assessed automatically: https://www.shl.com/en/assessments/cognitive-ability/skills-assessments/language-evaluation/ https://www.shl.com/en/assessments/cognitive-ability/skills-... https://blog.mettl.com/english-proficiency-test-software/ https://blog.mettl.com/english-proficiency-test-software/ The products have problems, though: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/07/1027916/we-tested-ai-interview-tools/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/07/1027916/we-teste...
- sgt101 5y ago
  sneeze Alphafold2 sneeze
daxfohl 5y ago
My feeling is there's as much anti-hype as there is hype these days. I'll continue with the maxim "progress is always slower than you think in the short term, and faster than you think in the long term."
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  The quantum computing industry definitely had a lot more hype than anti-hype. There is a very small minority of scientists who actually speak up against false or misleading claims, but a majority are either silent (why gratuitously jeopardize your own career or your funding avenues?) or amplify the hype (because their newfound startup depends on lay investors being excited for any reason so they’ll continue to put tens of millions of dollars in). (To be clear, there’s a ton to be excited about in quantum computing, and there are truly legitimate careers to be had both as a scientist and as an engineer. But what’s exiting currently isn’t very marketable or fashionable!)
  - daxfohl 5y ago
    Hmm, I guess I stand corrected. Going through these threads, I had no idea that there was so much hype about it. I thought everyone knew anything useful was still a long way off.
gigel82 5y ago
Quantum computers don't exist; qubits as they exist today are simply sources of entropy. So every time someone does a big fanfare announcement of this many qubit "computer" I chuckle a bit; ok, you got a bigger "random number generator", cool cool cool :) If you downvote, please also include a link to something that proves a quantum computer exists (outside of theoretical papers); I'm genuinely interested in being proven wrong.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  Quantum computers do more than produce random numbers. They follow predictable statistics predicted by quantum mechanics. These computers also run programs. Maybe your definition of “quantum computer” doesn’t agree with the field at large. What’s your definition? What do you think about Google’s supremacy experiment? Do you have objections to their results? [0] This is one of many papers by Google, IBM, Rigetti, and many other quantum computer manufacturers. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gigel82 5y ago
    Just to be pedantic, that experiment literally generates certifiable random numbers; it is also unclear if they have a real physical device; it appears their "Sycamore" design is theoretical and actually simulated on the Jülich (classic) supercomputer.
    - reikonomusha 5y ago
      When I said they do more than “produce random numbers”, I meant that they do more than such than that which is out of their control (i.e., due to noise). By the physics of a quantum computer, at their very foundation, they’re random number generators. What you program on a quantum computer is, more or less, the shape of the distribution from which they sample. A linear congruential generator from Knuth programmed on a classical computer produces controlled pseudorandom numbers. So what? Whether a LCG or a program to produce controlled samples from a goofy Porter-Thomas distribution, they’re both coming from machines that were programmed to do a job. If the machine was neither a computer nor programmable, then the job could not be done. You haven’t refuted the point of the published existence of a computer. The paper includes both the results of a program running on a quantum computer, and a comparison of the results as simulated by a classical computer, the latter taking several orders of magnitude to complete at several orders of magnitude increased cost.
mikewave 5y ago
I take issue with one part of this. Disclaimer, I work for D-Wave.... > It is unclear how exactly one can verify that a "quantum code" actually runs on a quantum computer (instead of a classical node inserted between the cloud and the QC provider), and there is a huge window for fraud there. I would like to know what the article's author would take as proof of this. All I can offer presently is my personal assurance as a team member helping to keep D-Wave Leap running. Every day, I work with a team of talented scientists, engineers, devops, and developers to help ensure everything from pipeline performance to monitoring cryogenics, and if there's one thing that I am certain of, it's that our end user submissions run on real hardware at a few millikelvin about absolute zero. I am certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are using quantum effects to achieve low-energy solutions to difficult problems using annealing. I'm also certain that we're making huge progress; from our massive lead in terms of raw qubit count (5000+) to our work making each of those qubits connect to more and more of their neighbours with less noise over time. There are exciting things coming.... If other companies are getting away with anything less and promising they're doing real-time quantum computing in the cloud, (1) it would be a huge surprise, and (2) their lives must be a lot cushier than ours, because it is a lot of work keeping something like this running. You want to talk about the woes of having to manage on-prem and hybrid cloud workloads, well, does your datacenter have plumbing for liquid helium? You monitor the temperature on a few server racks, but do you have to measure ten thousand different datapoints about air and fluid temperature and pressure? Honestly, it's a lot of fun, it's an exciting thing to be working on, and I don't agree with the author when he complains about brain drain. You want brain drain, go and look at the infinitum of startups hawking SaaS grift-ware like it's the next best thing since sliced bread. Sorry if we find it more interesting to work on this than on the next B2B way of slicing off a chunk of someone else's revenue for providing something obvious. "We do these things because they are hard", as the saying goes.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  To add to this as a former employee of a different quantum company that provides cloud services, there was absolutely no funny business about faking results. If you asked for quantum computer results, you got them, and it’s painfully obvious too. Obviously it’s in the realm of possibility that a company could fake, but I think if anybody was caught doing that, they’d tank their reputation within the community extraordinarily quickly. I haven’t heard of any serious or reputable company doing this. As for other things you’ve said, I definitely disagree with you and agree with the article that there is brain drain. That’s not to say every commercial entity is fully or continuously responsible for it, but DWave, IBM, Google, and every other company that currently or formerly over-promises or outright lies has drawn people out of academia into frequently senseless industrial positions.
deleted 5y ago
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RIMR 5y ago
Quantum computing deserves hype, but I'd like to see the stupid hype die down. I've heard claims that quantum computers "connect to alternate timeline versions of themselves" and would allow us to communicate with people from parallel universes. I've heard that they'll let you bypass traditional cryptography with such ease that you could steal all of the bitcoins in circulation in an afternoon. I've heard that it could guarantee a lottery win with only 100 picks. A bunch of high-concept nonsense that is simply not what Quantum computing is going to enable.
chestertn 5y ago
This has also harming other fields. I work as a researcher in a traditional engineering field with a very long tradition and well stablished methods. There is a push to use AI and Quantum such that in order to get funding or publish papers you need to say that you’re applying XYZ AI technique to solve a well known engineering problem. Because funding agencies want to sell to their investors or government managers that they are in the new hot trend, if you want to get funding money you need to have something related in your proposal. Of course, having previously published papers on the topic helps so that motivates people to send papers on the topic. The journal editors know that the topic is hot so they prioritize papers on this topic as their metrics will increase. The result is tons of rushed papers saying “Applying XYZ AI technique to well known engineering problem” usually without examining previous research methods or proper benchmarks. At the end the only barrier for this bro to happen is the individual moral standing of each researcher. Unfortunately, careerism usually trumps over this. Sorry if this was too bleak.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > There is a push to use AI and Quantum such that in order to get funding or publish papers you need to say that you’re applying XYZ AI technique to solve a well known engineering problem. How different is AI from good old fashioned stats again?
  - AbrahamParangi 5y ago
    It's clearly an extension, but in the same way that computer science is an extension of boolean logic.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    AI is what you do when you don't know stats
machinehermiter 5y ago
From talks I have watched, China is dumping money into quantum computing because Jian-Wei Pan and his team are genius. I don't think China has the same problems we do that people are worried about "hype" and all this nonsense. Jian-Wei Pan said they want to use their photon QC device and boson sampling to solve graph theory problems. I don't understand boson sampling enough to know if it makes sense for graph theory but obviously they have some ideas in mind. Quantum graph theory, quantum network science ideas I suppose. The video I watched also has 600 views and the only comment is if you can use a photon quantum device to mine bitcoin. That is a cultural problem we have, not a problem with science that humans have.
cortexio 5y ago
OMG.. finally! I have waited so long for an article like this. Praise the lord, the day has come :D, no but seriously, this article is amazing.
john579 5y ago
Glad to see someone with the courage to expose this ponzi scheme. Perhaps when the bubble pops, it will take quantum electrodynamics down with it, as it should.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
> hype is bad > linkedin.com
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Dumb investors losing money because they buy into hype without doing their homework (i.e. their job) is a good thing. It's a form of Darwinism. Happens all the time. So, let nature take its course and all will be fine. This is just the normal hype cycle playing out. Science is about asking questions and forming hypotheses to answer those questions and trying to falsify these. An influx of money is good for that process as the worst case here is that it will pile up a lot of documented falsification and thus lead to better questions. Which is still a good outcome. Once you have people asking the right questions and forming better hypotheses, everybody wins. Just because there are a lot of bad quantum computing startups doesn't mean that there aren't some more serious ones that are actually making progress. We've seen the same with all the smoke and mirrors AI BS coming out of silicon valley. Lots of glorified if .. else .. logic that gets peddled as deep learning. But in between all the BS, there are a few companies actually doing cool stuff and making some genuine progress.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  I studied a "hype" field a few years back (Machine Learning and its application to Brain-Computer Interfaces), and can't help but disagree with you. The AI hype didn't lead to documented falsification or better questions, but a mountain of bullshit literature that was designed to get grants and satisfy the "publish or perish" imperative.

136 points by nkurz 5y ago

okareaman 5y ago

The AI winter didn't seem to hurt AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

bitwize 5y ago
The AI field pre-winter has been obliterated by the winter. What is now called AI are the parts of the field that got less attention and funding back in the day, mainly prediction by statistical analysis of past data.
mcguire 5y ago
The AI winter of the 1980s destroyed quite a few careers. Many of the TAs when I was an undergrad graduated into that winter.
- yourenotsmart 5y ago
  It destroyed many people's careers, but it didn't destroy AI. There's a difference.
  - sgt101 5y ago
    It destroyed a particular vision of AI - that of Knowledge Engineering.
    - yourenotsmart 5y ago
      I'd say "not so fast".
sampo 5y ago
AI is very useful, even if the pioneers had to give up on the dream of human-level or human-like intelligence. There is quantum cryptography, but other than that I find it hard to find practical value for quantum computers before they reach the limit, maybe around 80 qubits fit for general computation, that they start to be faster than classical computers. Faster for solving meaningful problems, not useless problems designed for the quantum computer to solve fast.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

smoldesu 5y ago

The hype around QC is going to be essential in getting more people interested. If we can encourage people to learn the concepts of entropy, state and other fundamentals while their minds are still plastic, I say go for it! This article has a very elitist tone, which I can mostly forgive because of the subject matter. Hell, I even understand where they're coming from with regards to how poorly AI was marketed/integrated into our modern workflows. However, I think the conjecture that you're reaching is that 'transparency matters', which is true (albeit not particularly profound). The best solution that I can imagine is ensuring that the next generation of programmers has access to quantum runtimes.

reikonomusha 5y ago
Why do more people need to be interested? Why do we need to ensure access to quantum computers to programmers? Seriously, any programmer can fire up a quantum simulator for any number of the quantum instruction languages and be more productive than with a real quantum computer. Because of the hype, we’ve all been led to believe that we are “ready” to program quantum machines and we just need to train more people through boot camps, hackathons, and summer schools. It’s simply not true. The quantum computers of today are programmable (barely), and the programs do run (though you can only run a dozen or so “statements” before you get junk results), but they’re so wildly bad compared to what you’d expect out of a textbook that you easily conclude “the scientists have work to do”. Scientists do have more work to do, but it seems like every month there’s a perfectly respected scientist who gets a $15MM series A and starts spouting the same misinforming junk that quantum computing is going to help FedEx with logistics, or steel mills with operations planning. Then they hire a bunch of good academic people, pay them software-engineer salaries, and string them along to help them perpetuate the fundraising machine—not by actually doing science of course—hoping to also have a quantum computer/software/applications/algorithms be built as a by-product. Money is very attractive to people, especially physicists who frequently find themselves jumping ship for an alternative, higher-paying career. There must be around 100 quantum companies now, most of them startups, and—to my knowledge—zero of them providing anything demonstrated to be a valuable commercial product. Some of them are definitely doing good work here and there, but in the bigger picture, the profit motive—whether shareholder value or venture capital returns—consistently undermines their ability to do research.

gadders 5y ago

Things that are always 10 years away: [1] Those aeroplanes that can fly from London to Australia in 2 hours [2] Cold Fusion [3] Quantum computing

lr4444lr 5y ago
Cold fusion is still a hypothesis. As for that airplane ride, I dunno who was selling you that. What kind of fuel would the jet even use? Quantum Computing though is already here, it's just not practical for much outside of a lab setting.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  QC is here in theory, but it is not practical for anything - the experiments so far were only intended to prove that the thing was an actual quantum computer in the complexity theory sense. But it is impossible to actually use Google's device or the one in China to compute anything at all, even something like factoring 4 using Shor's algorithm is beyond the current capabilities. There is perhaps some more debate about D-Wave's device,both its status as a QC and its usefulness.
gswdh 5y ago
Don’t forget solid state batteries.
chki 5y ago
The distance from London to Sydney is 17.000km. The current flight airspeed record is 3.500km/h. I would doubt that anything close to 8.500km/h is physically possible without using rockets. That's the speed of the fastest missile.
- mrhyyyyde 5y ago
  The X-15 has recorded 7,274 km/h airspeeds. I'm no airspeed record expert but did some reading.
  - 5y ago

ssivark 5y ago

That this is a post on LinkedIn shouldn’t take away from the important points it is making :-) As a physicist who knows a little bit about quantum computing, my understanding is that we’re far far away from building usable quantum computers (it’s still at an applied research stage, and nowhere close to “just an engineering/design problem”) — all hype be damned.

reikonomusha 5y ago
I like to tell people that actual, programmable quantum computers do exist (which is a very important point—they’re not vaporware), but exactly like you say, in order to make them useful and scalable, more “actual science” needs to happen.
- xondono 5y ago
  They really don’t though. We have some things that if you squint a little, and are willing to stretch the words, look like a quantum computer.
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    They really do, and there are mountains of published experiments unambiguously verifying such.
    - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
      They "exists" in the same sense a hydraulic computer exists because I plumbed 5 valves at my house.
  - anon_tor_12345 5y ago
    they do and you can get time on one (5 qubits) right now https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/files/new https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/composer/files/new if you don't think these are computers then you just don't know what a computer really is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_(computer_science) they're not useful at all but they're still real actual unadulterated computers.

pphysch 5y ago

All hype is "bad" for science. Hype implies emotional investment or faith in an expectation, and science is specifically about challenging expectations (i.e. hypotheses) via practical experimentation. There is plenty of experimental research, and early practical results, being achieved in quantum computing. There is also lots of snake oil being peddled by sleazy entrepreneurs. This is true for all developing fields.

yourenotsmart 5y ago
Is it though? Hype causes people not familiar or well informed into the matter to get into it, hoping for big returns. Of course, they'll come out severely disappointed, but science and technology as a whole would have advanced, thanks to their efforts. Going blind into something with a lot of hype is often an "ice-breaker" for humanity into new areas of study.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  The article talks about this in good detail and why hype leads to: 1. Brain drain of talent 2. Ponzi schemes 3. Damage to the reputation of science

superjan 5y ago

If you have an hour to spare and are interested in what quantum computers might be good for in the long run, I recommend this interview(podcast, Sean Carrol’s Mindscape): https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/06/28/153-john-preskill-on-quantum-computers-and-what-theyre-good-for/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/06/28/153-...

AlexCoventry 5y ago

The hype is bad in its own right, but it's a symptom of how science is being funded and rewarded, which is a much bigger problem.

briantakita 5y ago

The Science industry is built on using buzzwords to get research $$$. Probably the same with most industries that reach a certain institutional scale. Institutional involvement leads to politics which leads to buzzwords & right-speak. Another case of "for the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil".

tus89 5y ago

coughmachine learningcough

qayxc 5y ago
There's absolutely no comparing the two fields. ML already has a massive impact on industry and society as a whole. The future of many careers will forever be altered even by current ML application, let alone future developments. From automated face recognition, to customer service, job interviews, risk assessment and protein folding, ML has become part of our daily lives already to varying degrees (of both impact and success). It's a field that won't go away and will only grow and probably change quite a bit in the next decades. Admittedly we're far from a Butlerian Jihad-situation, but there's no denying that ML is much more than just hype. AGI, now that's a different story.
- tester756 5y ago
  interviews? Oo cv scanning?
  - qayxc 5y ago
    CV scanning is old news. Nowadays even language skills are assessed automatically: https://www.shl.com/en/assessments/cognitive-ability/skills-assessments/language-evaluation/ https://www.shl.com/en/assessments/cognitive-ability/skills-... https://blog.mettl.com/english-proficiency-test-software/ https://blog.mettl.com/english-proficiency-test-software/ The products have problems, though: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/07/1027916/we-tested-ai-interview-tools/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/07/1027916/we-teste...
sgt101 5y ago
sneeze Alphafold2 sneeze

daxfohl 5y ago

My feeling is there's as much anti-hype as there is hype these days. I'll continue with the maxim "progress is always slower than you think in the short term, and faster than you think in the long term."

reikonomusha 5y ago
The quantum computing industry definitely had a lot more hype than anti-hype. There is a very small minority of scientists who actually speak up against false or misleading claims, but a majority are either silent (why gratuitously jeopardize your own career or your funding avenues?) or amplify the hype (because their newfound startup depends on lay investors being excited for any reason so they’ll continue to put tens of millions of dollars in). (To be clear, there’s a ton to be excited about in quantum computing, and there are truly legitimate careers to be had both as a scientist and as an engineer. But what’s exiting currently isn’t very marketable or fashionable!)
- daxfohl 5y ago
  Hmm, I guess I stand corrected. Going through these threads, I had no idea that there was so much hype about it. I thought everyone knew anything useful was still a long way off.

gigel82 5y ago

Quantum computers don't exist; qubits as they exist today are simply sources of entropy. So every time someone does a big fanfare announcement of this many qubit "computer" I chuckle a bit; ok, you got a bigger "random number generator", cool cool cool :) If you downvote, please also include a link to something that proves a quantum computer exists (outside of theoretical papers); I'm genuinely interested in being proven wrong.

reikonomusha 5y ago
Quantum computers do more than produce random numbers. They follow predictable statistics predicted by quantum mechanics. These computers also run programs. Maybe your definition of “quantum computer” doesn’t agree with the field at large. What’s your definition? What do you think about Google’s supremacy experiment? Do you have objections to their results? [0] This is one of many papers by Google, IBM, Rigetti, and many other quantum computer manufacturers. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5
- deleted 5y ago
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- gigel82 5y ago
  Just to be pedantic, that experiment literally generates certifiable random numbers; it is also unclear if they have a real physical device; it appears their "Sycamore" design is theoretical and actually simulated on the Jülich (classic) supercomputer.
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    When I said they do more than “produce random numbers”, I meant that they do more than such than that which is out of their control (i.e., due to noise). By the physics of a quantum computer, at their very foundation, they’re random number generators. What you program on a quantum computer is, more or less, the shape of the distribution from which they sample. A linear congruential generator from Knuth programmed on a classical computer produces controlled pseudorandom numbers. So what? Whether a LCG or a program to produce controlled samples from a goofy Porter-Thomas distribution, they’re both coming from machines that were programmed to do a job. If the machine was neither a computer nor programmable, then the job could not be done. You haven’t refuted the point of the published existence of a computer. The paper includes both the results of a program running on a quantum computer, and a comparison of the results as simulated by a classical computer, the latter taking several orders of magnitude to complete at several orders of magnitude increased cost.

mikewave 5y ago

I take issue with one part of this. Disclaimer, I work for D-Wave.... > It is unclear how exactly one can verify that a "quantum code" actually runs on a quantum computer (instead of a classical node inserted between the cloud and the QC provider), and there is a huge window for fraud there. I would like to know what the article's author would take as proof of this. All I can offer presently is my personal assurance as a team member helping to keep D-Wave Leap running. Every day, I work with a team of talented scientists, engineers, devops, and developers to help ensure everything from pipeline performance to monitoring cryogenics, and if there's one thing that I am certain of, it's that our end user submissions run on real hardware at a few millikelvin about absolute zero. I am certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are using quantum effects to achieve low-energy solutions to difficult problems using annealing. I'm also certain that we're making huge progress; from our massive lead in terms of raw qubit count (5000+) to our work making each of those qubits connect to more and more of their neighbours with less noise over time. There are exciting things coming.... If other companies are getting away with anything less and promising they're doing real-time quantum computing in the cloud, (1) it would be a huge surprise, and (2) their lives must be a lot cushier than ours, because it is a lot of work keeping something like this running. You want to talk about the woes of having to manage on-prem and hybrid cloud workloads, well, does your datacenter have plumbing for liquid helium? You monitor the temperature on a few server racks, but do you have to measure ten thousand different datapoints about air and fluid temperature and pressure? Honestly, it's a lot of fun, it's an exciting thing to be working on, and I don't agree with the author when he complains about brain drain. You want brain drain, go and look at the infinitum of startups hawking SaaS grift-ware like it's the next best thing since sliced bread. Sorry if we find it more interesting to work on this than on the next B2B way of slicing off a chunk of someone else's revenue for providing something obvious. "We do these things because they are hard", as the saying goes.

reikonomusha 5y ago
To add to this as a former employee of a different quantum company that provides cloud services, there was absolutely no funny business about faking results. If you asked for quantum computer results, you got them, and it’s painfully obvious too. Obviously it’s in the realm of possibility that a company could fake, but I think if anybody was caught doing that, they’d tank their reputation within the community extraordinarily quickly. I haven’t heard of any serious or reputable company doing this. As for other things you’ve said, I definitely disagree with you and agree with the article that there is brain drain. That’s not to say every commercial entity is fully or continuously responsible for it, but DWave, IBM, Google, and every other company that currently or formerly over-promises or outright lies has drawn people out of academia into frequently senseless industrial positions.

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RIMR 5y ago

Quantum computing deserves hype, but I'd like to see the stupid hype die down. I've heard claims that quantum computers "connect to alternate timeline versions of themselves" and would allow us to communicate with people from parallel universes. I've heard that they'll let you bypass traditional cryptography with such ease that you could steal all of the bitcoins in circulation in an afternoon. I've heard that it could guarantee a lottery win with only 100 picks. A bunch of high-concept nonsense that is simply not what Quantum computing is going to enable.

chestertn 5y ago

This has also harming other fields. I work as a researcher in a traditional engineering field with a very long tradition and well stablished methods. There is a push to use AI and Quantum such that in order to get funding or publish papers you need to say that you’re applying XYZ AI technique to solve a well known engineering problem. Because funding agencies want to sell to their investors or government managers that they are in the new hot trend, if you want to get funding money you need to have something related in your proposal. Of course, having previously published papers on the topic helps so that motivates people to send papers on the topic. The journal editors know that the topic is hot so they prioritize papers on this topic as their metrics will increase. The result is tons of rushed papers saying “Applying XYZ AI technique to well known engineering problem” usually without examining previous research methods or proper benchmarks. At the end the only barrier for this bro to happen is the individual moral standing of each researcher. Unfortunately, careerism usually trumps over this. Sorry if this was too bleak.

908B64B197 5y ago
> There is a push to use AI and Quantum such that in order to get funding or publish papers you need to say that you’re applying XYZ AI technique to solve a well known engineering problem. How different is AI from good old fashioned stats again?
- AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  It's clearly an extension, but in the same way that computer science is an extension of boolean logic.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  AI is what you do when you don't know stats

machinehermiter 5y ago

From talks I have watched, China is dumping money into quantum computing because Jian-Wei Pan and his team are genius. I don't think China has the same problems we do that people are worried about "hype" and all this nonsense. Jian-Wei Pan said they want to use their photon QC device and boson sampling to solve graph theory problems. I don't understand boson sampling enough to know if it makes sense for graph theory but obviously they have some ideas in mind. Quantum graph theory, quantum network science ideas I suppose. The video I watched also has 600 views and the only comment is if you can use a photon quantum device to mine bitcoin. That is a cultural problem we have, not a problem with science that humans have.

cortexio 5y ago

OMG.. finally! I have waited so long for an article like this. Praise the lord, the day has come :D, no but seriously, this article is amazing.

john579 5y ago

Glad to see someone with the courage to expose this ponzi scheme. Perhaps when the bubble pops, it will take quantum electrodynamics down with it, as it should.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

> hype is bad > linkedin.com

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Dumb investors losing money because they buy into hype without doing their homework (i.e. their job) is a good thing. It's a form of Darwinism. Happens all the time. So, let nature take its course and all will be fine. This is just the normal hype cycle playing out. Science is about asking questions and forming hypotheses to answer those questions and trying to falsify these. An influx of money is good for that process as the worst case here is that it will pile up a lot of documented falsification and thus lead to better questions. Which is still a good outcome. Once you have people asking the right questions and forming better hypotheses, everybody wins. Just because there are a lot of bad quantum computing startups doesn't mean that there aren't some more serious ones that are actually making progress. We've seen the same with all the smoke and mirrors AI BS coming out of silicon valley. Lots of glorified if .. else .. logic that gets peddled as deep learning. But in between all the BS, there are a few companies actually doing cool stuff and making some genuine progress.

AussieWog93 5y ago
I studied a "hype" field a few years back (Machine Learning and its application to Brain-Computer Interfaces), and can't help but disagree with you. The AI hype didn't lead to documented falsification or better questions, but a mountain of bullshit literature that was designed to get grants and satisfy the "publish or perish" imperative.