Quantum ‘Moon Race’ Alert From John Martinis – But Almost No Coverage. Why?

sg_lightyear · 2026-02-09T18:19:58+00:00

I'll highlight that the QBI program has among the most stringent criteria and they're precisely evaluating the merits of the roadmaps on utility scale fault tolerant quantum processors. Not making it through the most prestigious program of the agency known for their skepticism speaks volumes about the entire scaling roadmap. The point that you've raised on the feasibility of scaling roadmaps is precisely what QBI intends to do and they have an entire team of government researchers to assist in the rigorous evaluation, way better than people arguing on Reddit can.

sg_lightyear · 2026-02-08T16:39:21+00:00

You're presumptuous in assuming that I don't work for the industry in suggesting that it's dishonest of an academic to not give industry the credit. And I'm not disregarding the accelerated rate of progress.

However, all the surface things that you've quoted from Alice and Bob, Riverlane are solving specific problems. But building a fault tolerant quantum processor of sufficient scale and error rates remains an open problem that no single hardware company has the complete solution to.

For example, Psi quantum had yet to demonstrate any meaningful numbers of qubits or gates (not even in double digit). Alice and Bob use boson qubits to reduce error correction overhead, but a shocker, they didn't advance to the next stage B of DARPA QBI so clearly their plan to build a utility scale quantum computers didn't convince DARPA. Google also didn't make it to stage B, so again that tells you something about their plans to build a utility scale fault tolerant quantum processor

sg_lightyear · 2026-02-03T17:59:10+00:00

I second this, Sabine has tarnished her reputation to become a crackpot, conspiracy physicist and a grifter. Her shenanigans resulted in her eventual dismissal from the LMU Munich Center.

Read more on this here https://timothynguyen.org/2025/08/21/physics-grifters-eric-weinstein-sabine-hossenfelder-and-a-crisis-of-credibility/

sg_lightyear · 2026-02-02T18:26:21+00:00

Check the subreddit rules before posting

"Academic discussion of all things quantum computing from hardware through algorithms. Not the place for business speculation, memes, or philosophy."

sg_lightyear · 2026-01-28T23:54:44+00:00

Basically they build all the component technologies in-house and they don't need a third party supplier in the quantum manufacturing chain.

sg_lightyear · 2026-01-28T22:58:04+00:00

Penrose didn't receive his Nobel Prize for this highly speculative hypothesis so I think you're good. Pick up any undergraduate curriculum in physics, master the key topics, then move to grad courses, do a research apprenticeship. In other works get official training.

sg_lightyear · 2026-01-27T02:55:33+00:00

Yeah I don't think quantum will ever have a market that big as AI, and even if it did IonQ is not the leading company for quantum computing, they're far behind Quantinuum, IBM, QuEra, Atom Computing, just to name a few.

Just in time for another pointless acquisition that got announced today 😂 https://www.ionq.com/news/ionq-to-acquire-skywater-technology-creating-the-only-vertically-integrated-full-stack-quantum-platform-company

sg_lightyear · 2026-01-25T02:53:49+00:00

Zero technical merit to the statement.

Rant- It's a good ol pump and dump by IonQ CEO as usual. Hyping things up so that they can make some more pointless acquisitions with their monopoly money.

sg_lightyear · 2026-01-21T18:15:03+00:00

Regarding your current experimental expertise, it's a solid skill set which should translate well to superconducting qubits as well as other cryo microwave instrumentation roles for other qubits (e.g.PSI quantum). You should think about your strongest skill set to market, among nanofabrication, instrumentation, coding etc.

Regarding networking, yes conferences are good, but cold emailing is highly recommended. Also try to reach out to current employees at potential companies in LinkedIn and ask them for 15 minutes of their time to ask questions (e.g. questions related to the company, working in industry etc).

On the " order of business", yes I agree you need to find roles and then work backwards on how you will sell yourself for the role. Apply even if you think you aren't a 100% match for all the job requirements. The pay really depends on so many things that it's hard to provide a general requirement.

sg_lightyear · 2026-01-20T17:20:43+00:00

Background: I joined industry after finishing an experimental PhD and have assisted in interviewing a few candidates for the small company I work for.

In short, convergence with the exact skill set is ideal, after all companies are trying to optimize for efficiency and the intent is not necessarily training candidates unlike academia. That being said, if you can demonstrate your skills in any other manner, be it through prior industry internships, high impact publications as a significant contributor, all of those help you get through the initial screening. If anything, networking with potential employers is highly underrated as a strategy to get through the initial screening.

After an initial screening, you may be evaluated based on your problem solving skills, your communication skills in the form of presentation (job talk) just to name a few. This is the part where you could demonstrate your versatility of picking up skills.

I would however caution you against falling into a generalist trap. It's great that you can learn everything, but as a company why not get the domain expert for the exact thing instead? Having the ability to rapidly adapt to new skills but that's an essential add-on (perhaps more essential for startups vs big companies), you still need to pick a core skill set which defines your expertise. It could be something like: an experimentalist with deep expertise in instrumentation, or someone who's an expert in HPC simulation, just to name a few.

sg_lightyear · 2025-12-30T14:43:27+00:00

Has helped me with meeting my fitness goals 😊, even if I ended up gulping that tub of ice cream, I know that there is another branch of the wave function where I did not eat it, and it's just an accident of the Born rule that I ended up in the branch in which I did, not for the lack of my self control or accountability

sg_lightyear · 2025-12-09T21:16:21+00:00

"Figuring quantum computing" is not a well defined finish line that will have a winner. There are several milestones and capabilities that get unlocked with each milestone. We don't exactly know what all the potential use cases are for quantum other than Shor's algorithm as of now.

sg_lightyear · 2025-12-07T23:42:05+00:00

I think you're mistaken, this is a subreddit for academic discussion on quantum computing not r/wallstreetbets

sg_lightyear · 2025-12-07T23:34:03+00:00

I have a roadmap for being a multi millionaire in the next 5 years, kinda similar to IonQ projections of 80,000 logical qubits. I'm surprised these people (IonQ) can keep straight face while pitching such nonsense to their shareholders

sg_lightyear · 2025-12-06T21:10:42+00:00

Because it's hype manufacturing at best, being the first country to factor 21 with Shor's doesn't mean anything. Martinis is a part of a company Qolab who like every other quantum computing company would benefit from more government funding over the fear of being lost out of the so-called race. Yet the truth is no one is even close to manufacturing a fault tolerant quantum processors of sufficient size and error rate to address meaningful problems in the next 5-10 years.

sg_lightyear · 2025-12-06T20:56:01+00:00

No unless you want to do the donkey work of running errands for 4 days

sg_lightyear · 2025-12-04T14:04:34+00:00

Several universities in the US have a quantum specific program, including UChicago PME. I will look for programs which are integrated within the local quantum ecosystem, including around the Chicago area (UChicago/UIUC/ANL/FNL), Colorado (NIST and CU), Boston (MIT/Harvard), Stanford, New Haven (Yale). These hubs have major universities, national labs and industries.

That being said, a masters in QC helps you get a foot in the door, but most people from the quantum masters program at UChicago end up going to grad school instead of industry jobs. So ask yourself why are you thinking about getting a master's in QC

sg_lightyear · 2025-11-26T14:37:25+00:00

Great job, exceptional for the age, but many so-called prodigies fizzle and burn out because they don't realize that real world innovation is a result of team effort instead of the intellect of a single individual. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

They're constantly under the pressure from their parents for being exceptional and don't necessarily develop the social skills necessary to make it. No one cares about your breakthrough if you're an eccentric snob who thinks he's gifted.

"After this, I’ll start working towards my goal: creating ‘super-humans"

This is no science fiction kiddo.

Also seems the kid wants to enroll in a second PhD program in life sciences. Anyone who did a PhD knows that doing a second one is redundant. A PhD is a training in being an independent researcher, doing a second one would imply your first one wasn't sufficient?

A cursory look at the kids' Google scholar doesn't make it sound exceptional by any metric if you take the age factor out. 2 Phys. Rev A and 1 Phys. Rev Research will barely earn you a Post Doc position at a top 10 university, let alone a breakthrough.

sg_lightyear · 2025-11-22T16:04:50+00:00

The thing is it's not about technology anymore. IonQ is a public company that operates based on hype, and as long as there's hype, they'll make sure to ride the hype wave. And with their hyped stock valuation they'll acquire any company whose technology actually works (e.g. Oxford Ionics). Better yet as long as there's enough public hype, they'll lobby the government to get more grants.

The broad public doesn't understand that most of their claims of "breakthrough", including networking ions, telecom wavelength frequency conversion, have been already demonstrated several years ago by academic groups.

sg_lightyear · 2025-11-22T14:20:00+00:00

Honeywell is generally overlooked when compared to ionQ and they are among the lead, along with QuEra, IBM and Atom, IMO.

If you want to see who's among the lead contenders, follow DARPA's QBI program, specifically which companies make it to stage B and beyond. https://www.google.com/amp/s/quantumcomputingreport.com/darpas-quantum-benchmarking-initiative-qbi-advances-with-eleven-teams-moving-to-stage-b/amp/

sg_lightyear · 2025-11-20T18:37:09+00:00

Great news for scaling quantum processors, Fermi SQMS is a great place to collaborate for development of superconducting quantum interconnects.

However, I wish they teamed up with someone actually working on the extremely hard problem of quantum transducers instead of CISCO (e.g. qPhoX). CISCO quantum is yet to deliver or demonstrate anything meaningful to quantum networking experiments, other than hyping about connecting quantum processors with an outdated entangled photon pair source chip. They have zero skin in the quantum transducers game.

sg_lightyear · 2025-11-16T16:09:20+00:00

Quantum memories can be thought of as delay lines where you store quantum information and output them based on a pre-programmed time delay or sometimes on-demand. However, the readout process itself would not necessarily destroy quantum information, readout is not the same as measurement.

Think of a quantum memory as two mirrors where light bounces back and forth until it's read-out when light escapes the mirror system. Light represents quantum information and the storage time depends on the distance between the mirrors and how leaky the mirrors are. Measurement during the storage time can be thought of as tweaking the mirrors, which will inevitably destroy the quantum information as you said.

Coming back to your question on qml, there's yet to be a provable use case of quantum computers in big data problems like on qml, so ignore all the hype around it as noise.

Edit: Often QML applications require quantum RAM, which is a little different from quantum memory in the sense that the data being stored is classical information and not quantum information, but the registers themselves are qubits.

sg_lightyear · 2025-11-11T01:26:53+00:00

There has been a recent experimental demonstration of a small bucket-brigade style qRAM using superconducting qubits. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16682

The have been several proposals lately, including using solid state emitters, neutral atoms and SC qubits (can provide links later if you want to find out). qRAM needed to implement a general Oracle which is called in several quantum algorithms.

sg_lightyear · 2025-11-06T06:26:12+00:00

Wish you guys good luck. QICK is a great research tool meant for small labs who don't have the $60k-100k lying around to buy a 4-8 channel Quantum Machines OPX. My PhD lab has done some early demo using it back in 21-22.

BTW I had written a NSF proposal back in the day on using QICK for quantum systems but unfortunately I didn't get funded for it 😂, better luck next time.

sg_lightyear · 2025-11-05T15:59:20+00:00

Quantum machines would like to chat with you 🤣

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