Cambridge Quantum Computing Has Built a “Meaning-Aware” Natural Language Processing System on a Quantum Computer
(Sifted.edu) Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) says it has built “meaning-aware” natural language processing on a quantum computer. The system understands both grammatical structure and the meaning of words, in a way that classical computers cannot.
“This is quantum native, it cannot be done with a classical computer with a reasonable amount for resources,” says Ilyas Khan, chief executive and founder of CQC, in an interview with Sifted.
This is because, according to Kahn, classic computers simply don’t have enough processing power to be able to both understand the rules of grammar and recognise word patterns.
Natural language processing is generally done on the basis of recognising patterns in a “bag of words”. Even Open AI’s GPT-3, which can produce very human-sounding text, is based on modelling the relationships between words, like a very very sophisticated autocorrect.
The exponentially-larger quantum state means natural language processing on a quantum computer can code complex linguistic structures and novel models of meaning in quantum circuits.
“Until now there has been this question of what you would really use quantum computing for. This is another genuine use case that everyone understands. It is not some arcane experiment,” says Khan.