Research Putting AI & Quantum Computing On a (Positive) Collision Course

(VentureBeat) It doesn’t really matter whether you believe quantum-mechanical phenomena is going to change everything. The mere research into the field is already impacting technology across the board. A true quantum computer is still years, if not decades, away. When has that ever stopped researchers?
Recently Mobileye cofounder Amnon Shashua and a team from Hebrew University in Israel published a paper in Physical Review Letters titled “Quantum Entanglement in Deep Learning Architectures.” NOTE: Intel acquired the computer vision firm Mobileye for $15.3 billion in March 2017. The paper argues that the latest advancements in deep neural networks could help physicists better understand the quantum behavior of nature.
IBM Research, MIT, and Oxford scientists recently published a paper in Nature titled “Supervised learning with quantum enhanced feature spaces.” The paper describes that as quantum computers become more powerful, they will be able to perform feature mapping on highly complex data structures that classical computers cannot.
Neither of these papers necessarily means that AI will solve our quantum problems or that machine learning will benefit from quantum advancements. What is increasingly clear, however, is that the two fields are on a collision course.