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We see a similar thing with Ai / ML where there is a huge amount of hype but applications of quantum computation are only restricted to searching an unstructured database, finding prime factors of a number , solving a linear system of equations , computing knot invariants and the obvious one which is quantum simulation. [1]

It would be better just exposing this as a library of functions and then hooking it up to a cloud service to solve. Which Amazon, Microsoft and IBM have. Microsoft and IBM are using their own hardware And Amazon is reselling other providers. [2,3,4,5]

Researching post quantum cryptography algorithms are already on their way [7] but most likely feasible quantum computers are 80 years away when I was reading a great deal of quantum algorithm papers as a class and I asked the professor how long it would take.

The interesting strategy if you were to hack a organization which has encrypted backups would be to exfiltrate the backups and then wait for a quantum computer that could break it which is why post quantum encryption needs to be researched but the algorithms involved are still in their early stages.

Post [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm

[2] https://quantumai.google/hardware [3] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/quantum-computin... [4] https://aws.amazon.com/braket/ [5] https://www.ibm.com/quantum [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography?wpro... [7] https://pqcrypto.org/conferences.html




State of quantum computing is much worse than AI/ML.

AI/ML easily demonstrates superiority - from playing games, classification, translation, generative art etc.

QC is stuck at no practical use with claims that it'll stay this way for decades, some claiming forever as there may be physical walls that can't be broken.


Totally agree should have played that much more up in my comment.


My current ML project is funded because the bank regulator said it would have to be done or there would be a big fine.

I do not think that there will be a QC project done on the same basis for 40 years.


There were less than 40 years between the first integrated circuit and the world wide web. I mostly share your QC skepticism, but as a bet this would be risky.




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