The AQ Revolution of the 2030s

DARPA's interest in Quantum computing evolves.

Hey Everyone,

I’m really into future studies. I’m particularly interested in the arrival of new kinds of A.I. that intersect with Quantum computing. When Google spun off Sandbox AQ, there was this idea that as the world enters the third quantum revolution, AI + Quantum software will address significant business and scientific challenges.

How will quantum machine learning (QML) then arrive if fault-tolerant quantum computers come about and get big enough to scale? The result could be far more eventful than even the impact of LLMs and Generative A.I.

Physicists say it is a flip of the coin whether quantum computing will end up a revolutionary capability or not much better than today’s supercomputers. And yet, quantum’s potential means there’s too much promise there to ignore.

Joe Altepeter, a program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO). Altepeter manages two of DARPA’s three main quantum programs — including the  (US2QC) program. In fact, for QC thought leaders, LinkedIn may be the best network related to its development, startups and journalists.

SandboxAQ is an enterprise SaaS company combining AI + Quantum tech to solve hard problems impacting society and really is a pretty serious Google spin-off that is worth tracking. DARPA’s interest in Quantum computing of course, is nothing new.

The interest in quantum  computers took off in 1995 when Peter Shor discovered an algorithm for efficiently factoring large numbers.

DARPA stands for The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

At DARPA, their mandate is to eliminate strategic surprise and consolidate National interests in things like Defense. While people have been thinking about quantum computers and factoring for decades now, we’re interested in the next application which might take us all by surprise and lead to a computing revolution.

 The FIDO2 protocol is run between web applications (also called ‘relying parties’, such as the Google or Apple services you might log in to), web browsers (also called ‘clients’),authenticator hardware tokens (such as a smart phone or the above-mentioned USB tokens), and users. It is defined using two subprotocols: WebAuthn and CTAP(Client To Authenticator Protocol). But how will this all work in the coming quantum internet era?

Quantum computers utilize basic units known as qubits rather than 1s and 0s like traditional computers. Its computing power stems from the potential for each qubit to be both 1 and 0 simultaneously, rather than being restricted to one or the other. As a result, a quantum computer could run more complicated algorithms and operate much faster than a traditional computer. This is vaguely known as Quantum advantage.

Are Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computers on the Horizon?

Nobody knows exactly when fault-tolerant and scalable Quantum computers might arrive, there’s a lot of hype and hope, mostly hype although in the realm of computing you don’t want to be waiting in case it’s actually legit. That’s basically why I started my Quantum Foundry Newsletter in 2022.

Why don’t you start a Newsletter in January, 2023 as a new year’s resolution and see where it leads you?

With IBM boasting of having launched the first commercial quantum computer in 2019, and with Google’s declared demonstration of quantum supremacy in the same year, it seems that the quantum future is well under way. But how much has actually and really occurred in the last three years to make it seem that way? It’s debatable I think. Meanwhile the first wave of Quantum computing startups to go public, are now mere penny stocks for speculators.

While Venture Capitalists and Governments have been generation with the funding, it might even take decades from 2023. Let’s be realistic. It’s been hypothesized that quantum computing will one day revolutionize information processing across a range of military and civilian applications – from artificial intelligence, to supply chain optimization, to pharmaceuticals discovery, to cryptography. Prevailing predictions are that it will be decades before fully fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of solving important problems are available.

• Military applications

• Civilian applications

• A.I.

• Supply-chain optimization

• Pharma and drug discovery

• Cryptography

• Quantum sensing in astronomy and Space-Tech

• Finance and banking

• Biotech, chemistry and materials

It all sounds so impressive in theory and in the breadth of the potential impact. But how would such an AQ arrive? Such an intersection of artificial intelligence and quantum computing?

DARPA’s Efforts

DARPA announced the Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program. US2QC aims to determine if an underexplored approach to quantum computing is capable of achieving utility-scale operation much faster than conventional predictions.

According to DARPA itself, As various quantum computing research and development efforts advance globally, however, DARPA wants to rigorously assess any quantum research claims that a useful fault-tolerant quantum computer could be built much sooner.

Geopolitical tensions with China and its allies means Quantum computing is also on a timescale of National budgets in military spending and R&D in the future military application of A.I., robotics, space-tech and drone swarms, among other things like Satellite surveillance.

My prediction is the 2020s are formative, but it’s in the 2030s that an AQ revolution becomes more likely and more probable, though not at all guaranteed. New paradigms usually take much longer than the hype or even the optimism would suggest, and the same thing is occurring with the mythical pursuit of AGI, or artificial general intelligence.

An existing DARPA program, Quantum Benchmarking, is developing quantitative benchmarks on the software side to thoroughly assess potential applications where quantum computers could provide a meaningful improvement over classical computers for important problems. US2QC is a complementary hardware effort focused on verifying and validating system, component, and sub-system designs for a proposed fault-tolerant quantum computer.

“The complexity of a fault-tolerant utility-scale quantum computer could approach or exceed that of a classical supercomputer. A verification and validation effort that demonstrates a utility-scale design is viable, all necessary components and sub-systems for the computer can be produced at the required specifications, and all components and sub-systems can be successfully integrated would likely be a difficult, multi-year process.” - Dr. Joe Altepeter

DARPA’s Quantum Prophecy

According to the head of DARPA’s Quantum Program, he did say something interesting with regards to the hype vs. hope debate:

Of the 10 smartest physicists I know, about half of them are convinced that quantum computers are going to totally revolutionize computing in the 21st century and be a revolutionary way to solve problems from material science, to chemistry, to mathematics, to optimization.

The 21st century is a vast timeline though, and 2023 is nearly here, leaving decades to fulfil this prophecy.

Machines vs. Computers

The Quantum poet also wrote something important here: First and foremost, we are still very far away from having a true quantum computer – or anything similar to those imagined full-stack quantum machines that are futuristically predicted to transform human civilization. The “quantum computers” that QC companies report having built are not, in fact, “computers”.

They are experimental, rudimentary quantum processing devices that are still in the early stages of striving to control the fundamental units of quantum information, qubits, named by analogy with the “bits” of classical computing.

It’s entirely possible researchers in China will actually beat Americans to working Quantum computers hooked up to supercomputers. It’s DARPA’s job to make sure the West is first. But it appears China is putting more money into the R&D around the intersection of A.I. and Quantum computing and has been doing so for nearly a decade longer than the U.S.

While DARPA was typically at the bleeding edge of emerging tech, what if this time they are not?

Even Sandbox AQ is under the pressure to show monetization and a business model that works in today’s world. For instance for enterprises they are focusing on a post-RSA cybersecurity modules that migrate enterprises to higher levels of security. There are so many cybersecurity companies out there.

So much of the PR and hype does not meet the criteria of the facts and science. This is alarming some physicists. Even BigTech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google appear just at the conception stage that there will be an actual demand for these existing “quantum processing devices”, that are not even yet “quantum computers” in reality.

Perhaps only Microsoft appears to have a long-term vision for what could be the solution.

DARPA is not convinced that quantum is going to be a revolutionary capability. They even claim that the DoD doesn’t even use quantum computing for anything real right now as of December, 2022.

Because innovative approaches to building a quantum computer are extremely varied, we are at just an incredibly nascent stage where hype and speculation runs rampant since we don’t have much else to go by. It’s a bit like people talking in the 1970s about AGI, which 50 years later seems equally distant and vague of a possibility. Although some today might believe that ChatGPT is somehow a step in that direction, I don’t think GPT-3.5 is anywhere near or resembling even human-level AI (HLAI).

DARPA should in theory have more interest in drones that utilize Quantum sensing to see in all conditions, rather than any speculative achievements of Quantum machines that are erroneously called “computers”.

I think therefore we need to approach Quantum hype with exceeding restraint, logic, common sense and caution.