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The Atlantic Quantum team is joining Google
- condensedcrab 1y agoDon’t cross the quantum and AI streams!! On a more serious note, I’m not convinced that solving NISQ scaling with ML can overcome interconnect scaling. Interconnects are needed to make logical qubits, but introduce increased error rates. Even with better hardware, the scaling problem remains hard. It’s like getting LLM agents thru complex agentic paths and the hard problem of decreasing error rates.
- Yoric 1y agoI'm not even certain that you need fault-tolerance to do ML with quantum computing.
- moralestapia 1y agoGoogle wants to win in Quantum so bad, they have to make up for their absolutely embarrassing lack of hindsight with AI. Edit: Downvote all you want, OpenAI is a half trillion USD company now and quickly rising.
- jeffgreco 1y agoYa mean foresight?
- dekhn 1y agoLack of foresight in AI? They own one of the world's largest GPU/TPU fleets. They have some of the most advanced research and a path to deploy products. What exactly else should they have foreseen?
- vlovich123 1y agoDoubling down on LLMs specifically (which came out of their own research). Also getting to a point to commercialize it first. Their TPU fleet wasn’t really optimized for LLMs until recently afaik.
- fine_tune 1y agoLLMs are only 3-5 years old (NLP is much older OFC), for all we know they'll be a dead end in research like LSTM are today - LLM/Multi Modal just look super hot. "Attention is all you need" was released in 2017, it took 5 years to prove it was useful, for all we know the new hot thing has already been published and LLMs are obsolete - Google might have been right to wait. Besides I dont think the top people at Google's DeepMind - and I can only "infer" this from watching them speek online - actually think LLM's are "the one".
- vlovich123 1y agoIs the goal GAI or to add as much as possible to the market cap? I was specifically talking about the latter and why they got leapfrogged by OpenAI which has been valued at a substantial fraction of Google’s overall value despite having a fraction of the revenue. If Google had managed to generate this much value for themselves they’d be respected differently but for now it seems like they missed the AI tech stack today and are playing catchup for like the next 5 years regardless of where AI evolves later.
- dekhn 1y agoLarry's original goal for Google was always to be a revenue vehicle to reach AGI although I don't think Sundar is interested in anything except revenue/profit. Note also that many of Google's previous attempts with LLM generated significant press controversy, and it was in Google's interest to let other groups take the heat for a while while the overton window shifted.
- moralestapia 1y ago>1Tn+ USD created >a dead end Sure, pal.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- guywithahat 1y agoNot OP, but maybe lack of achievements in AI is a better way to phrase it. They had one of the earliest, serious AI programs and did an enormous amount of work, but for whatever reason one would like to attribute they've consistently fell behind other competitors. I mean Grok, which was started quite recently, is better than Gemini in most tasks and arguably has a stronger market position. Google should have mopped the floor with them given their funding and the age of their team but that never happened.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoThe Google relevant AI team were in full panic mode on the release of ChatGPT. Source: friend’s friend is on the team.
- austhrow743 1y agoThat someone else would take their attention is all you need research and scale it. They should have buried it or been first. Instead they’re playing catchup.
- Workaccount2 1y agoOpenAI has the benefit of being priced entirely on promises. Google has a lot of realized potential, which investors always find underwhelming.
- apwell23 1y agowhy don't investors see same potential in google. 'investors are stupid' is very unconvincing?
- Workaccount2 1y agoGoogle has grown $1T in valuation in the past year. That is two OpenAI's in size.
- freehorse 1y agoGoogle (alphabet) is a publicly trading company, and its share has doubled in value over last 2 years or so.
- cubefox 1y agoGoogle has led AI research for years with Google Brain and DeepMind, but they have been overtaken by OpenAI now, and perhaps soon also by other players who are building gigantic data centers. Google's core mistake was arguably that they were far too late in coming up with a model that was competitive with GPT-4. Now ChatGPT has likely more than an order of magnitude more subscribers than Gemini. At the same time, Google's search engine is increasingly replaced by ChatGPT, drying up their main source of revenue: search ads. Recently one of their top reasoning researchers switched to OpenAI, likely leaking Google's internal reasoning secret sauce, if they even knew anything that OpenAI didn't. I doubt they will catch up.
- dboreham 1y agoChatGPT has no revenue model. Once it begins degrading results with advertising content, people won't use it. They're only using it in preference to Google today because it is ad-free.
- cubefox 1y ago> ChatGPT has no revenue model. They have, subscriptions: https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-first-half-revenue-rises-16-about-43-billion-information-reports-2025-09-30/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-first-half-revenu...
- bitpush 1y agoYou can look at comparables to see how that'll workout Arguably the most mainstream and well-known subscription company is Netflix. People all around the world know about it, most have subscriptions and yet it hasn't "taken over" the world. That's before we consider any other company (Anthropic, Google) can undercut OpenAI in price or just simply be good Unless something drastically changes, OpenAI will have tough time justifying high valuation.
- Yoric 1y agoTo the best of my understanding, OpenAI is investigating exactly one path to AI, while Google has always been investigating many. I actually believe that Google will survive OpenAI.
- rdtsc 1y ago> Google wants to win in Quantum so bad, they have to make up for their absolutely embarrassing lack of hindsight with AI Quite the opposite, they have plenty of hindsight. One might argue it's 20/20 even! With DeepSeek what we found was that the moat wasn't that deep (pun intended!) and they may have lacked some foresight, they caught up pretty well.
- gabbagool 1y agoTo this day, I wonder if Google knew that they couldn't be the ones to unleash AI unto the world. They clearly had the wherewithal and expertise to do it (Vaswani et al, 2017), but were under so much antitrust pressure at the time that it seemed inconceivable that they could be the ones to introduce such a polarizing technology to the world. What kind of firestorm would have rained down on them if they were the first. Or, you might think, if Google had the technology, and they knew how to turn it into a trillion-dollar product, it's beyond ridiculous to think they would just hand the win over to someone else.
- scottyah 1y agoI think they just saw it as slop, they were working to make it more reliable and accurate. Releasing it first would tarnish their name, it just wasn't ready. OpenAI had no name to tarnish, so people were more willing to deal with the subpar experience as they refine it.
- sva_ 1y agoThe valuation comes from SoftBank and some Arab oil money that buy some $6b in shares, not from being publicly traded as Alphabet is.
- bigyabai 1y agoGoogle invented the transformer architecture, so I genuinely have no clue what you're talking about. Do you actually think they should have kept it a secret from the world? Do you think Google would genuinely be a better company if they monopolized the tech? In this day-and-age, it feels like HN refuses to advocate for anything that isn't a monopoly. Are we incapable of imagining competitive markets now?
- Yoric 1y agoWell, I don't think it's particularly related to AI, but Google has been known to make... interesting claims regarding quantum performance, at least once per year, to justify some kind of advance.
- hmokiguess 1y agolet me know when they build a prime radiant
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nakamoto_damacy 1y agoWatch as quantum hype gradually replace AI hype. Like AI not all of it will be hype but there will be 80:20 ratio of hype to benefit. And the greatest benefit will be to those who trade on hype. Stating the obvious.
- parsimo2010 1y agoQuantum hype will not replace AI hype. Quantum has already had its time of overblown expectations and has cooled off to realistic expectations. It won’t be cool or hyped again until general purpose quantum computing becomes a reality.
- SeanAnderson 1y agoRigetti Computing is up 315% in the last six months. So, I'm not as confident in this analysis as you. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RGTI/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RGTI/
- parsimo2010 1y agoRigetti, a company with $11B market cap is playing in a smaller league. OpenAI will have that much in revenue this year, and has a market cap almost 50x higher. The hype is not the same.
- SeanAnderson 1y agoYeah, that's fair. I agree RGTI (and QUBT, +100% last 6mo) both have much smaller mcaps, but they also kind of seem like (maybe?) more reflective of quantum hype than companies which have a quantum department but aren't defined by their quantum capabilities right now.
- chews 1y agoOpenAI's first half saw them with 4B in profit and 13B in loss.
- Yoric 1y ago
- MichaelKSpencer 1y ago[dead]
- cashsterling 1y agoAtlantic Quantum has some brilliant people and I'm sure they have some great ideas. That said, I dislike the quantum computing craziness we're in where big claims are made without proof or data. "We have the fastest clock speeds, lowest error rates, and most scalable architecture... no data, just take our word for it." It will be interesting to see how they do in the DARPA QBI program.
- _aobj 1y ago[dead]