Today’s Brief Commentary:
At the beginning of my talk at Quantum.Tech DC last week, I showed the above image as the bridge that quantum computing providers are trying to build and cross to give us Practical Quantum Advantage.
I define this as the point when quantum and classical systems work together and perform significantly better than classical systems alone. I use “practical” to clarify that these quantum systems must show the advantage for the currently intractable problems most important to society and business. That is, esoteric lab experiments are interesting but give us the performance we have been promised for chemistry, materials science, optimization, industrial applications, and, maybe someday, AI.
At the conclusion of the discussion, I listed eight reasons why a vendor may fail to cross the bridge and perish upon the metaphorical business rocks below:
- Didn’t partner: Thought they could develop everything themselves without bringing in others with complementary or adjacent technology.
- Didn’t scale: Focused too long on far too few qubits.
- Didn’t network: Didn’t create larger systems by connecting smaller ones with quantum networking.
- Didn’t scale while networking: Thought they could ignore networking, only to find others had created systems orders of magnitude larger.
- Didn’t develop real logical qubits: Kept looking for NISQ-era uses of their systems along with the 80+ other vendors in the field. Possibly created their own definition of a logical qubit.
- Believed non-useful results were useful: Routinely invented new forms of “quantum advantage” and believed their own hype.
- Obfuscated actual progress: Failed to be honest about the current capabilities of their systems compared to others, dooming their efforts when others found out the truth.
- Didn’t know technology or business history: Thought that quantum was special and didn’t follow the usual patterns and cycles for hardware, software, investment, and economic return.
Regarding the bullet about obfuscation and lack of details, my LinkedIn post on this topic may interest you.
Don’t forget to check out and bookmark our new sortable list of upcoming quantum technology conferences.
The latest Sutor Group report is freely available online: Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) Market Landscape (Abridged) – April 3, 2025. Updates and the full report are available for purchase or by subscription. Contact us for details.
Contents
Podcasts and Videocasts
Quantum Computing, Ready to Address Real-World Use Cases | IQM
https://meetiqm.com/webinar/quantum-computing-ready-to-address-real-world-use-cases/
Date: Thursday, November 14, 2024
Commentary: I attended this in November and it is worth a watch.
Excerpt: According to Hyperion Research’s 4th annual Global Quantum Computing Market survey, about half of the market for early use cases of quantum computing is expected to be in chemistry, financial services, and cybersecurity by 2026.
In the first of our free webinar series, lead discussant Bob Sorensen, Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing at Hyperion Research, will delve into “Quantum Computing, Ready to Address Real-World Use Cases.”
Quantum Computing
PsiQuantum Announces $10.8M Contract with Air Force Research Laboratory to Deliver Novel Quantum Chip Capabilities to the U.S. Air Force | PsiQuantum
https://www.psiquantum.com/featured-news/psiquantum-afrl-omega
Author: Alex Mack
Date: Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Excerpt: PsiQuantum today announced a $10.8M contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Rome, N.Y., continuing a partnership that began in 2022. This phase will give AFRL a design space for comparative quantum circuits on PsiQuantum’s circuit tapeout, part of its ongoing Omega quantum chipset manufacturing with GlobalFoundries. As AFRL’s hardware design partner, PsiQuantum will supply its high-performance Barium Titanate (BTO) Electro-Optic phase shifters and integrate BTO into AFRL-designed optical circuits. PsiQuantum’s 300mm BTO material is believed to be the world’s highest-performing electro-switch material. The company will also provide essential quantum circuit components. Once designed, constructed, and screened for performance, the company will deliver these completed chips to AFRL, who will then validate their capabilities to address other Air Force use cases.
Quantum computing: an unprecedented architecture to eliminate errors | Inria
https://www.inria.fr/en/quantum-computing-unprecedented-architecture
Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Commentary: This is a profile of French quantum computing company Alice & Bob and their cat qubit approach.
Excerpt: It is estimated that at least one million and even up to a billion operations are required for a quantum computer to perform useful calculations. But today, at best, one operation in every thousand is invalid. This error rate renders the result unusable… However, Inria researchers, in collaboration with the startup Alice & Bob, may well have found a solution to overcome such errors, by combining a type of quantum information unit (‘cat qubits’) with linear error correcting codes (LDPC). Their work featured in a Nature Communications publication on 26 January 2025.
Quantum Computing | Technical
[2503.21650] Hacking quantum computers with row hammer attack
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21650
Authors: Almaguer-Angeles, Fernando; Dieguez, Pedro R.; H., Akshata Shenoy; and Pawłowski, Marcin
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2025
Commentary: In an article in New Scientist, Oliver Dial of IBM Research said, “When using IBM’s quantum computers, there is no circumstance at present in which two users can run circuits on the same quantum hardware at the same time, making this and related techniques impossible to use in practice.”
Excerpt: We demonstrate a hardware vulnerability in quantum computing systems by exploiting cross-talk effects on an available commercial quantum computer (IBM). Specifically, based on the cross-talk produced by certain quantum gates, we implement a row hammer attack that ultimately allows us to flip a qubit. Both single-qubit and two-qubit operations are performed and analyzed. Our findings reveal that two-qubit operations applied near the target qubit significantly influence it through cross-talk, effectively compromising its state.
Benchmarking the performance of quantum computing software for quantum circuit creation, manipulation and compilation | Nature Computational Science
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-025-00792-y
Authors: Nation, Paul D.; Saki, Abdullah Ash; Brandhofer, Sebastian; Bello, Luciano; Garion, Shelly; Treinish, Matthew; and Javadi-Abhari, Ali
Date: Friday, April 18, 2025
Excerpt: We present Benchpress, a benchmarking suite for evaluating the performance and range of functionality of multiple quantum computing software development kits. This suite consists of a collection of over 1,000 tests measuring key performance metrics for a wide variety of operations on quantum circuits composed of up to 930 qubits and O(106) two-qubit gates, as well as an execution framework for running the tests over multiple quantum software packages in a unified manner. Here we give a detailed overview of the benchmark suite and its methodology and generate representative results over seven different quantum software packages. The flexibility of the Benchpress framework enables benchmarking that not only keeps pace with quantum hardware improvements but also can preemptively gauge the quantum circuit processing costs of future device architectures.
Quantum Error Correction and Fault Tolerance | Technical
LDPC-cat codes for low-overhead quantum computing in 2D | Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56298-8
Authors: Ruiz, Diego; Guillaud, Jérémie; Leverrier, Anthony; Mirrahimi, Mazyar; and Vuillot, Christophe
Date: Sunday, January 26, 2025
Excerpt: Implementing full quantum error correction incurs a significant hardware overhead. Here, the authors propose a quantum computing architecture combining superconducting cat qubits with 2D local LDPC codes, featuring low overhead and ease of implementation.
Sutor Group Intelligence and Advisory
Dr. Bob Sutor is the CEO and Founder of Sutor Group Intelligence and Advisory. Sutor Group provides broad market insights and deep technical expertise based on over four decades of experience with startups and large corporations. It advises Deep Tech startups, companies, and investors on quantum technologies, AI, and other emerging tech fields.
Sutor Group shares its knowledge and analysis through direct client engagements and seminars, reports, newsletters, books, written and on-air media appearances, and speaking and panel moderation at the top conferences and client events.
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