Quantum News Briefs August 10: NIST’s flagship post-quantum cryptography guidance aimed for release the week of August 12 • White House says agencies need $7.1B to transition to PQC • Scientists illuminate a path to quantum AGI with new light-based chips
In Other News:
NextGov reports: “NIST’s flagship post-quantum cryptography guidance aimed for release the week of August 12”
reported in August 9 NextGov that guidance meant to ensure the U.S. is ready to shore up cyber defenses against a potential quantum computers’ ability to break through modern encryption methods are set for release the week of August 12, according to people familiar with the matter.
The development of the finalized post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards are led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Commerce Department’s scientific standards bureau. NIST has finalized the guidance and is readying its release in the coming days, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the release timeline.
Experts have previously told Nextgov/FCW that implementing quantum readiness cryptography into digital systems is just “the starting gun” for a larger mass migration to secure digital networks in an uncertain quantum future.
“You can think of the NIST standardization as basically the starting gun,” Scott Crowder, vice president for IBM Quantum Adoption and Business Development said in a previous interview. “But there’s a lot of work to be done on taking those standards, making sure that all the open source implementations, all the proprietary implementations get done, and then rippling through and doing all the hard work in terms of doing the transformation upgrade.”
Meritalk reports that “White House says agencies need $7.1B to transition to PQC”
A recent report from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) finds that Federal agencies will need approximately $7.1 billion to transition their prioritized information systems to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) between 2025 and 2035 according to Cate Burgan’s August 7 article in Meritalk. Agencies were required by OMB to provide a prioritized inventory of cryptographic systems to the White House by May 2023.
A large chunk of that multi-billion-dollar estimate, OMB acknowledged, would be to replace the government technology that cannot support new PQC systems.
OMB’s report, released on July 1, was congressionally mandated by the Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act signed into law by President Biden in late 2022.
The report notes that the initial government-wide projection of $7.1 billion “reflects a high, but expected, level of uncertainty associated with the inventory and transition to PQC.”
Coin Telegraph reports” Scientists illuminate a path to quantum AGI with new light-based chips”
Scientists in China recently developed an artificial intelligence training chip that uses light instead of electricity to conduct computations as reported by Tristan Greene in August 9 CoinTelegraph. According to the team, it’s extremely more efficient than the most popular AI chips on the market.
Meanwhile, an unrelated team of researchers out of Oxford demonstrated that similar light-based computing techniques
These two breakthroughs represent a potential fork in the road for the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), also known as “human-level AI.”
The use of light to perform computations has been around since the 1960s. It’s often referred to as optic computing, and according to physicists working in the field, it could one day replace electrical-signal compute due to the fact that generating light takes much less energy than generating electricity.
If photonic AI chips prove to be a viable, energy-efficient alternative to the status quo, then it’s possible they could push GPT models beyond what would otherwise be feasibly possible due to their efficiency alone.
And when it comes to interfacing with any potential quantum AI solutions in the future, it’s a simple fact of nature that light travels faster than electricity.
