What can we expect from one of my favourite Deep Tech subjects — Quantum Computing, Sensing and Communications and Quantum everything…
As 2021 closed we saw significant momentum from the bigger brands that are betting the house on quantum to save their business models — IBM, Honeywell…and some moves by AWS and other tech giants that recognise they need to have a story, a position and offering.
Then we saw the SPAC craze finally enter quantum realms with the IONQarrival on the New York Stock Exchange — a full stack quantum company…who will. Soon have their hands on $600m to deliver on their promise. And we expect a string of others in 2022 including Rigetti, and no doubt PSIQ, Xanadu and others will follow…
The second half of 2021 saw several key mergers and partnerships…non more interesting that Cambridge Quantum Computing and Honeywell’s Quantum business unit. Now formally merged and in 2022 will trade as Quantinuum.
It is also likely the big VC firms will try to dominate and corner the market in Quantum as valuations are likely to rise quickly having witnessed what is going on in enterprise AI and specifically BioTech Ai. They like to buy and pump that also keeps everything for themselves.
At government level increased spending continues with more grants and capital piling into Quantum as the Intelligence Community want to get to the future first. With Putin’s words ringing in their ears “the nation that leads in AI ‘will be the ruler of the world” during 2022 we will more formally witness the shroud of a new ‘quantum cold war’ descend as certain nation states struggling with economic certainty are betting on being able to hacks prosperous nations.
When one looks at the available Quantum processing market — actual quit processing for use, capacity is already at 100%. Whilst qubit processing options are limited, available capacity for the foreseeable future is already taken. Purchased, committed, gone.
This position also masks a deeper issue for Quantum that will deepen during 2022 as the skills shortage bites hard. The best Quantum and Physics talent is being snapped up. Some of the best people tempted away from academia while others future stars are being courted by large pay cheques and cool stuff to play with.
Performance will again take another step forward in 2022. 0221 saw several key computer science and physics breakthroughs. Numerous projects while looking for stability and performance are rethinking some of the fundamental approaches the first projects emerged that looked at Quantum Networking in background the US Dept Energy will continue their work in developing a Quantum Internet.
More Quantum projects working on room temperature approaches involved Photonics and photons as the primary sub atomic particle to work its magic. We also saw the emergence of photon layers — as translation layers further progress the industry stack starts to build out. Imagine being able to harness and use qubits from different machines and approaches?
Stable qubits with error correction at room temperature. A team in Japan recently perfected the Nitrogen Vacancy, replacing Carbon atoms with Nitrogen to harness the benefits of a special ‘spin state’ — called Spin Locking that reduces noise and interference — especially useful in imagery heavy applications.
Other breakthroughs in compact atomic clocks (Cold Atom Clock) will help Quantum Computer scale faster and improve all communications, improving accuracy and timing, as we enter a Satellite Internet era.
A large number of breakthroughs are coming from teams that are working on the organisation and structuring of sub atomic particles — trying to find ways to better organise these difficult to control atoms into structures where they can create better stability and function, reduce interference that will make manufacturing a ‘useful quantum machine’ much easier.
Another area where I expect to see major moves in 2022 is in the area of Quantum Neural Networks and AI models that prepare the data for Quantum Processing. Early breakthroughs show Quantum Neural Nets are very good at identifying and finding the outliers, the things that traditional narrow AI normally miss or are not programmed to see. However the main interest in Quantum Neural Nets seems to be the rate of learning from teaching. Although still enormously complex the Quantum AI models are making huge breakthroughs in reducing the time to trains neural nets while using increasingly larger data sets.
2022 will see a continued explosion of new teams and Quantum Start Ups, Spin Outs and Academic teams each working on different parts of the Quantum Stack as thus far the majority of useful applications has been in the areas of Quantum Annealing, a very specific part of the Quantum landscape, nevertheless is delivering great outcomes on solving very specific and narrow (hard) problems.
The big brands will keep filling the headline columns as each of the major vendors pushes past 100 qubits with some claiming 250 qubits will happen much sooner than first predicted. Google, IBM, Honeywell will no doubt fight it out, but then the cool stuff is happening in the smaller start ups where more and more are being accelerated will lots of capital pumped in for prototyping and proofs beyond the academic papers.
As we closed out 2021 we are looking closely at incubating a number of small Quantum projects with big potential. Each one with the potential to become a multi billion company as they take on and crush the classical ways of doing things by 2025.
Predictions are very difficult in the world of Quantum Computing as not only is the landscape moving fast, the complexity of the core problems in terms of hard remain significant. A function of capital, of in some ways blind faith in what could be, as smart money places bets on a Quantum Future…
Author: Nick Ayton
Nick is a futurist, technologist, writer and speaker.