(Cambridge) From developing new drugs to combating global warming, quantum computing is raising hopes for major progress. On a shopping street in Cambridge, the race towards this heralded technological revolution is in full swing.
For Steve Brierley, founder of the Riverlane company, based in the famous university town in central England, the technology will have its “Sputnik” moment in the coming years, named after the Soviet satellite whose launch in 1957 was a major step in the conquest of space.
“Quantum computing will not just be a slight improvement over previous computers, it will be a huge step forward,” he assures AFP.
His company produces the first microprocessor dedicated to this technology with gigantic computing power, which detects and corrects the errors currently slowing its development.
Building devices “that live up to the incredible promise of this technology requires a massive shift in scale and reliability, which requires reliable error-correction systems,” says John Martinis, former lead developer of the technology at Google’s Quantum AI Lab.
In a sign of interest in Riverlane’s business and in general in this technology compared to artificial intelligence (AI) for its potential disruptions, the company announced on Tuesday that it had raised $75 million from investors.
“Within two to three years, we will be able to reach systems capable of supporting a million operations without error,” compared to only a thousand currently, says Earl Campbell, vice president of Riverlane.
This threshold, he says, is considered crucial to making quantum computers more powerful than their current equivalents.
With its ability to stimulate interactions between particles, atoms and molecules, the technology is considered likely to enable the development of revolutionary drugs or radically improve the production of fertilizers, an industry that emits a lot of CO2.2.
It could pave the way for much more efficient batteries, which play a key role in the fight against global warming.
Infinity of states
The amount of information that quantum computers can mine increases exponentially with their size, unlike current devices.
Classical computing is based on data stored in the form of bits, which have only two possible states (0 or 1). Quantum computers use “qubits”, basic building blocks that have an infinite number of possible states that can overlap and intertwine.
However, this operation, which uses the extraordinary properties of matter at the atomic or subatomic level, has a disadvantage: their strange behavior requires the use of complex algorithms to process them.
Qubits are also very sensitive to errors due to noise, and solving this problem will be “crucial,” says Steve Brierley, surrounded by oscilloscopes and integrated circuits in his company’s laboratory.
Computer giants like Google, IBM and Microsoft are investing huge amounts of money in this technology and in particular in trying to reduce the errors induced, either by protecting the devices or by using algorithms to detect and correct these errors.
“Lessons from AI”
Given this complexity, the interest in technology is expressed mainly in large computers. When their scale is increased, the possibilities offered increase faster than the defects to be solved. In other words, these machines work better for complex tasks.
“We certainly won’t use quantum computers to send emails,” smiles Steve Brierley. On the other hand, “we will be able to solve problems that would otherwise be insoluble,” he adds. The entrepreneur considers the results obtained to be “very exciting.” “The challenge now is to be able to scale up.”
Current advances, in addition to the potential for technology that could overcome all existing encryption systems and create new materials, are already attracting the attention of regulators.
Steve Brierley believes that it is “very important to learn the lessons of AI so as not to be surprised by this technology and to think very early on about its implications.”
“I think quantum computing will eventually be regulated because it’s a very important technology,” he says. “And I think it’s a technology that no government wants to be second-guessing.”