The New Quantum Era

Chapter 12. The Heroic Era of Qubits

This scheme, like all other schemes for quantum computation, relies on speculative technology, does not in its current form take into account all possible sources of noise, unreliability and manufacturing error, and probably will not work.

Rolf Landauer

Researchers at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory announced in June 2024 that they had surpassed the results achieved in Google’s quantum supremacy experiment using classical computers. The supremacy experiment is, of course, the one described in Chapter 1, the one held up as proof that quantum computers can provide superior performance, and a widely cited justification for continued investment in the field. In 2019, Google’s Sycamore chip took 10 minutes to complete the task of generating randomized quantum circuits, and in 2024, the team from China used a cluster of Nvidia GPUs to complete the same task in 14.22 seconds. A far cry from the 10 thousand years that Google had said it would take a classical computer. Even more impressive, the Shanghai AI lab’s solution used less power than Google’s device, consuming just 0.29 kWh of electricity, compared to the 2.39 kWh used by Sycamore. The claim of supremacy seems utterly extinguished. Could this be the mass extinction that culls the enormously diverse efforts to build quantum computers?

The quest to build a quantum computer that can create economic value has always been fraught with risks, and many skeptics have doubted that ...