Broad strokes this article raises some ok points. She’s wrong about SC qubit coherence times and she’s wrong about refrigeration being any kind of bottleneck. You could buy a dilution fridge from bluefors off the shelf. The microwave hardware and optics and all this stuff costs an order of magnitude more. Just kind of a low effort article. If you want to beat on SC qubits, bring up cosmic rays. She’d know that if she passed this by an expert, which I guess she’s too smart to do.
Either quantum computers pan out over the time investors stay interested or they don’t. It’s not unlike any other technology. As far as physicists feeling embarrassment, why should we? One, we’re largely incapable of feeling it, and two, we tried and that’s cool.
You have these VCs who have a very narrow view of how the future should be (chiefly being that which makes them richer) so you can only pitch so many technologies that fit that mold. To be blunt, find me a better technology that could potentially push the boundaries of human capability or understanding or whatever that VCs will invest in. Beats the hell out of VR. Is it cooler than shooting stuff into orbit? Seems on par to me.
Cooling is definitely a problem is your aim is to cool down the millions of physical qubits required to get the thousands of logical qubits needed to do an actually useful quantum computation. No one has scaled up their qubit technology to achieve millions of physical qubits, and this is going to be a very big computer with tons of thermal mass that needs to be cooled down sub-kelvin. That is a substantial engineering challenge.
Qubits are getting smaller at the same time their coherence times are getting longer. The millions of qubits figure assumes pretty crappy coherence times. I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t fit a future QPU on a 4 inch wafer or some kind of stack of them.
Finally, again, dil fridges are a solved problem. Not only are they solved but there’s a ton of room for improvement. They’re very inefficient. You can just make bigger ones with more dil units.
That leaves the wiring, but you remove a lot of that with cryosilicon computers and multiplexers.
I would also say that Sabine is wrong on a number of points, like coherence times, but I thought that the problems with cooling were correct. Since I don't know much about cooling, would you be happy to elaborate?
Either quantum computers pan out over the time investors stay interested or they don’t. It’s not unlike any other technology. As far as physicists feeling embarrassment, why should we? One, we’re largely incapable of feeling it, and two, we tried and that’s cool.
You have these VCs who have a very narrow view of how the future should be (chiefly being that which makes them richer) so you can only pitch so many technologies that fit that mold. To be blunt, find me a better technology that could potentially push the boundaries of human capability or understanding or whatever that VCs will invest in. Beats the hell out of VR. Is it cooler than shooting stuff into orbit? Seems on par to me.