Quantum News Briefs May 24: D-Wave Quantum CEO Urges Leaders to Plan for AI and Quantum Future; In Other News: Politico explains “Washington should care about quantum”; In Other News: SCMP reports China, US & Europe hit quantum internet technology milestone at almost the same time
Press Release Summaries Below:
D-Wave Quantum CEO Urges Leaders to Plan for AI and Quantum Future
Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave, is calling upon business leaders to immediately prioritize the exploration of quantum computing as they continue to accelerate their AI adoption, according to a May 20 news release issued by the company.
The release explained that in his most recent Forbes Technology Council guest column, Dr. Baratz wrote that as AI continues to advance at an astonishing rate, it also consumes vast amounts of energy. Quantum computing could help develop more powerful and sustainable AI models, offering a more scalable and energy-efficient solution to drive supercharged optimization. Dr. Baratz offers steps leaders can take now to bring quantum AI into their enterprise, starting with identifying strategic areas where quantum AI could make an immediate impact, such as driving more precise predictions of supply and demand to give organizations a competitive edge.
“With sustainability now an added business imperative, the combination of quantum with AI could help organizations forecast demand more precisely and align production, minimizing the creation of excess goods and reducing waste through the supply chain,” Dr. Baratz wrote. “By using quantum to optimize routing, production and inventory management based on AI-powered forecasting, quantum and AI together could help organizations reduce the need for transportation and storage, reducing costs and carbon emissions.”
In Other News Below:
In Other News: Politico explains “Washington should care about quantum”
On the policy front, quantum proponents are hitting some friction, according to a May 20 article in Politico.. For decades, the government has funded the underlying science of quantum mechanics. Now, those same sources of funding are facing shortfalls, as quantum needs help to transition from making scientific discoveries to developing applications that could finally bring the technology into the mainstream.
Despite the rise of quantum-specific startups and more existing companies shifting into the space, the private sector is not expected to make returns on quantum anytime soon, meaning it’s a riskier bet for investors and thus more dependent on federal research money.
Congress lately has really struggled with following through on pledged funding for early-stage research. House Science Chair Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) drew attention to the problem in a hearing last week, stressing that “innovation thrives on stable, predictable funding. Lucas and the committee’s top Democrat, California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, have pushed for reauthorizing the National Quantum Initiative Act (NQIA), which will set national scientific, economic and security priorities for quantum over the next five years.
“Even if there’s just a small chance of the quantum computing programs that we hope to develop working,” she said, “It’s actually a pretty low cost investment.” said Jane Bambauer, a University of Florida law professor who has analyzed the state of quantum policy
In Other News: SCMP reports China, US and Europe hit quantum internet technology milestone at almost the same time
Researchers have created entanglement networks in Hefei, Boston and Delft in separate studies that bring uncrackable encryption closer to reality according to the May 17 South China Morning Post.
Research teams in China, the US and the Netherlands have independently reached nearly simultaneous breakthroughs that could bring nearly unhackable quantum-based internet services closer to reality.
The peer-reviewed journal Nature, which published two of the studies on Wednesday, said the experiments – using three actual cities – were the most advanced demonstrations of quantum internet technology yet.
Each team used optical fibres tens of kilometres long to establish a network within an urban environment, based on the quantum phenomenon of entanglement that allows a pair of separated photons to remain intimately linked across time and space.
