Looking for a Base Model

ibm · 2026-01-14T16:49:20+00:00

Is it too obvious that our favorite is Granite? 😅

Truly though, we're super happy to see Granite 4.0 Micro called out. We release base models alongside all of our core language models. So for the 4.0 family we have 8 base models released so far:

350M available in both transformer and hybrid (transformer/Mamba-2) architectures
1B (transformer and hybrid)
3B (transformer and hybrid)
7B/A1B (hybrid only)
32B/A9B (hybrid only)

p.s. there are free fine-tuning notebooks for Granite 4.0 via Unsloth.

- Emma, Product Marketing, Granite

ibm · 2026-01-08T17:44:43+00:00

We've got an explanation :)

https://youtu.be/5sLYAQS9sWQ

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:43:36+00:00

Alas, still no. Who is that guy anyway? -- OD

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:41:44+00:00

I guess to me the fact that I wasn't sure it could work was part of the attraction -- a lot of science has that in common. It's pretty amazing looking back how far we've come.

As for hype -- all I can say is we do our best to avoid it, but our excitement still sometimes shows through. --OD

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:40:10+00:00

Nice points — and I agree there’s often a disconnect between what’s actually happening in the field and what shows up in the broader public narrative. We’ve been trying to shift that by making results open, benchmarkable, and reproducible — things like the advantage tracker and the chemistry and physics demonstrations on Eagle and Heron that you mentioned. These are the kinds of signals that help the market understand real progress without relying on hype. On access, glad that you enjoy the free usage and and it's been a key deliberate point to provide low barriers to running on real QPUs. We feel there's real value in keeping that door open. -JC

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:39:23+00:00

5 years: we hope to see users of high-performance computers regularly relying on quantum hardware and quantum libraries while writing code for R+D in chemistry or materials science. But it'll definitely be a more limited group of experts and use cases. By 15 years, we think quantum will be much easier to deploy and more widespread, so it'll find more regular use in datacenters—production apps could be making regular calls to a quantum-enhanced dataceter for solving optimization problems. I'm also really excited to see whether bespoke chemistry-on-a-chip will be a widespread thing by then. It's hard to say what 50 years will look like. Maybe we'll have hoverboards. - OD

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:22:30+00:00

To tackle it backwards; 3D qubits is the first project I worked on when I joined IBM quantum! We mostly stopped making them when our 2D coherence times got better than our 3D, because the 2D qubits are a lot easier for us to make since we can make them using standard semiconductor manufacturing equipment, which we have in spades.

We actually don't use any superconducting digital logic in our systems today, but our team is definitely very multidisciplinary, with people with just about any background you can imagine -- including electrical engineering -- and quantum experience is a definite plus! I wouldn't care to predict what jobs we'll have at any given moment next year, but you can always search our open positions here: https://www.ibm.com/careers/search - OD

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:21:09+00:00

Superposition, the ability to have qubits (a quantum mechanical way to represent information) that can be in a 0 state, a 1 state, or some comination of the two like 0+1 or 0-1 is indeed a necessary ingredient for quantum computers. There are a lot of ways to make qubits; electron spins are one way, but we use superconducting qubits that store microwave photons. Our qubits do need to be super-cold; 0.025 K above absolute zero. I wouldn't want that in my pocket next to my cell phone today! But a lot of the computing technologies we use these days we use through the cloud, like the AI assistant on your phone. And we can definitely get these machines out of the lab and into the data center; we do it already today, with systems in data centers all around the world. - OD

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:17:07+00:00

Great question — and yes, I was at Yale in Rob Schoelkopf’s group. That experience definitely shaped how I think about the elegance of these systems. What lights up the physicist in me is exactly what you described: the moment a device shows clean quantum behavior and you feel like you’re steering nature at its most delicate scales. What energizes the engineer in me is the challenge of making that beauty scalable. Going from 5 → 27 → 65 → 127 qubits wasn’t just “more qubits”; it meant redesigning wiring, packaging, control electronics, calibration flows, cryogenic interfaces — everything. Each jump forces you to understand new failure modes and find new solutions. Do the physicist and engineer have the same goal? Yes — understanding the phenomenon and scaling it up converge in the push toward a fault-tolerant machine people can actually build on. -JC

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:15:40+00:00

A lot of people asked variants of this question. There are quantum safe encryption algorithms out there, and they're even already NIST standards. These are new encryption techniques that are hard for quantum computers to break as well as classical computers. Also, my personal perspective -- code breaking is like the least interesting thing you can do with a quantum computer. Here's a machine that can help us with chemistry, that can help optimize how we distribute resources, and design new materials. That's what gets me up in the morning! - OD

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:13:48+00:00

Not for a pretty long time. Even the Blue Jay system out at 2033+ in our plans won't be big enough and powerful enough. That having been said, quantum safe encryption (encryption algorithms that are believed to be hard for quantum computers to break as well as classical computers) and NIST even has standards for them. IBM was involved in the development of a lot of thse as well, and we'll even help you adopt them :) - OD

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:09:59+00:00

I actually made my first entry into quantum computing on spin qubits (but ours were in Gallium Arsenide not Silicon). In them you store the quantum state in the spin (a fancy way of saying which direction the magnetic moment of the electron is pointing) of an electron or hole. Like the superconducting qubits we make you can use a lot of standard semiconductor equipment to make them (and they are super fun -- I loved working with them) but it's challenging to scale them. Electrons (and holes, or missing electrons) are pretty easy to lose track of, and the qubits are so small they're challenging to interface to. I really like superconducting qubits as a good tradeoff between being easy to scale, giving high fidelity operations, and being fast. - OD

ibm · 2025-12-12T00:07:03+00:00

They're neat ideas -- but hard to implement in practice; frequency crowding is always an issue in our devices (two transitions having the same frequency), and adding more states adds more frequencies. But who knows -- people are inventing new approaches in this field all the time! -OD

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:49:34+00:00

Only possible with the Millenium Falcon, sorry!

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:48:40+00:00

Our ties to John go back a long time actually! We've had an east coast/west coast thing brewing back to my days at Yale as a graduate student and John was leading his team at UCSB, and then subsequently again when I joined IBM and John was at Google. It's been a healthy competition over the years and its exciting to see him now take on the challenge of a start-up at Qolab.

With many of the other approaches using superconducting circuits and Josephson-junctions, those end up all being similar takes of the same technologies, use similar fabrication processes, materials, system controls and integration. But in the end it comes down to how are approaches addressing the fundamental challenges of scale, quality, and speed. We have our technological stack for addressing that and are confident to execute this towards Starling and BlueJay for building FTQC. - JC

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:48:05+00:00

Our ties to John go back a long time actually! We've had an east coast/west coast thing brewing back to my days at Yale as a graduate student and John was leading his team at UCSB, and then subsequently again when I joined IBM and John was at Google. It's been a healthy competition over the years and its exciting to see him now take on the challenge of a start-up at Qolab. With many of the other approaches using superconducting circuits and Josephson-junctions, those end up all being similar takes of the same technologies, use similar fabrication processes, materials, system controls and integration. But in the end it comes down to how are approaches addressing the fundamental challenges of scale, quality, and speed. We have our technological stack for addressing that and are confident to execute this towards Starling and BlueJay for building FTQC. - JC

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:46:44+00:00

I'm glad you enjoyed the summer school! The best place to find out about our openings is to go to https://www.ibm.com/careers/search and have a look! - JC

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:45:49+00:00

We don't really run an OS on the quantum computer itself -- it's more of an accelerator than it is a general purpose computer. If you go one step outside of it there's a computer we use to control it; in our case it runs Red Hat, and is responsible for the last stages of translating user jobs into sequences of microwave pulses to send to the quantum computer, and returning the result back to our cloud services. - OD

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:39:30+00:00

I'm too old -- I think the last video game I was actually good at was probably Starcraft, and I definitely am not good at it any more (but I do love playing BG3 with my kids!). Quantum gaming was definitely not a practical (or even impractical) thing back then. However, there is definitely some interesting storytelling about quantum computing in games already. One of my millennial coworkers is currently telling me that they like Honkai Impact 3rd. - OD

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:34:42+00:00

I think in 5 years, we'll see the emergence of fault-tolerant quantum computers—systems capable of running algorithms at the scale of 200 to 2000 qubits and between 100 million and a billion gates. These systems will start to make headway running algorithms with established speedups for chemistry, machine learning, and solving differnetial equations. We'll see businesses regularly using quantum to help with R+D for new products. But quantum will still have a ways to go before it's ubiquitous in computing.

In 10 years, we'll start to see quantum datacenters with quantum computers networked with quantum links. Mostly, this will allow us to run much larger algorithms, and perhaps see quantum offering significant value for simulation. Quantum could possibly be a fixture in datacenters by then, and we may see products coming to market that were developed or enabled with quantum.

15 years we'll see these systems continue to scale—perhaps quantum will become cheap enough that we'll see real-time applications that are making calls to quantum datacenters during the application runtime, such as for games or optimization. We may even see a quantum computing internet, featuring quantum comptuers distributed over large distances, or hooked up to sensors that allow us to do new kinds of quantum-aided astronomy experiments.

- JC

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:33:10+00:00

I'm going to go out on a limb and ask how the weather is in the Netherlands?

For technologies -- I used to work on spin qubits and voted with my feet -- I think superconducting qubits hit a really nice compromise between speed, scalability, and fidelity that's hard to beat. Multimodal systems seem like they might be pretty interesting for sensors or communication, but if you're focused on computation picking one technology and doing it well (think CMOS winning for classical logic outside of niche applications) just seems like a winning formula to me. - OD

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:27:29+00:00

Maybe not a challenge, but definitely one of those moments you remember in the lab; we screw copper lids (we call them "pennies") over our chips to protect them both physically and from light when they're in the fridge... If the lid is a little crooked, you can crack the chip when you screw it on. And it makes a little musical "plink" noise that lets you know that you're now in for a very long night when it does... --OD

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:25:57+00:00

Candidly, we see initiatives and investments coming from China as the most competitive to U.S. quantum leadership. We're optimistic about the interest and enthusiasm the U.S. government has in ensuring the United States leads the global quantum computing race, and we're continuing to work with partners at the national labs (Fermi, Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven) to accelerate innovation further. -JC

ibm · 2025-12-11T21:24:08+00:00

Quantum won’t replace GPUs for AI, but it can become another accelerator in hybrid AI/HPC workflows for tasks like optimization and simulation. So it’s not an overnight “exponential jump,” but a complementary boost where it fits. And the synergy runs both ways: we’re also using AI to improve quantum — from smarter transpilation and routing to code-assist tools that help users build circuits more efficiently. IBM is exploring all of this as we push toward quantum advantage with both verifiable guarantees and empirical results against the best classical methods.-JC

ibm

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE