>The computer is (said to be) live and in use by companies, so cryogenic cooling keeps the system temperature as close to absolute zero as possible to conserve that precious quantum state.
Before LLMs/AI became the obvious "next big thing in computing" I remember coming across a fair number of opportunistic devs on LinkedIn trying to promote themselves as "quantum software engineers", and even a just a year or two ago I would see "quantum machine learning" on people's profiles. I remember thinking maybe I had missed something and seeing how many qubits we could even have... needless to say it was (and still is) not enough for any meaningful ML work quite yet.
If you search you can still find some, and, as someone who has spent more than a decade doing actual machine learning, I find the audacity to claim that you're doing any kind of serious software engineering, let along proper ML work, on a quantum computer to be almost impressively audacious.
As a fellow currently dipping my toes into quantum machine learning, I think that you think we're saying "machine learning on quantum hardware", when what we actually mean is "machine learning for quantum computing on classical hardware". That is, using machine learning on classical computers to try to increase the effectiveness of quantum hardware.
This is consistent with IBM's history of putting computers doing customers' work on display. I am aware of the company doing so in New York and Toronto.
They also have one displayed at the Cleveland Clinic main campus _cafeteria_
Imo focusing in “showing off” instead of “providing value” is a bit of a product-smell. Maybe thats just the point tho, IBM seems to prioritize impressing C-suites over actually accomplishing anything
It’s not unheard of in the medical realm. Slightly different but when Intuitive Surgical released their DaVinci robotic surgery platforms, a hospital system I worked with was early on their list. They also set up the demo unit in the cafeteria so you could see surgeons peeling oranges and then stitching them back up or what not.
Back in the early 2000s I worked for Cap Gemini in Birmingham England which had a part of the office that was some sort of partnership with IBM GS(I think IBM did the hardware and cap got the services contacts). They also had a big blinkin lights server setup in the middle of the office for clients to see. As a teenage geek in his first tech job I used to love going to peek at it even though I did tape rotation on the real servers in the basement most days.
The system is clearly not "live and in use" without its dilution fridge and thermal radiation shields.
>The computer is (said to be) live and in use by companies, so cryogenic cooling keeps the system temperature as close to absolute zero as possible to conserve that precious quantum state.
But can it factors 21? [1]
[1] Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082587
Before LLMs/AI became the obvious "next big thing in computing" I remember coming across a fair number of opportunistic devs on LinkedIn trying to promote themselves as "quantum software engineers", and even a just a year or two ago I would see "quantum machine learning" on people's profiles. I remember thinking maybe I had missed something and seeing how many qubits we could even have... needless to say it was (and still is) not enough for any meaningful ML work quite yet.
If you search you can still find some, and, as someone who has spent more than a decade doing actual machine learning, I find the audacity to claim that you're doing any kind of serious software engineering, let along proper ML work, on a quantum computer to be almost impressively audacious.
As a fellow currently dipping my toes into quantum machine learning, I think that you think we're saying "machine learning on quantum hardware", when what we actually mean is "machine learning for quantum computing on classical hardware". That is, using machine learning on classical computers to try to increase the effectiveness of quantum hardware.
Just as long as we don't observe it reeeeally closely, I imagine.
Dil fridge will get a bit hot with its clothes off like that
This is consistent with IBM's history of putting computers doing customers' work on display. I am aware of the company doing so in New York and Toronto.
They also have one displayed at the Cleveland Clinic main campus _cafeteria_
Imo focusing in “showing off” instead of “providing value” is a bit of a product-smell. Maybe thats just the point tho, IBM seems to prioritize impressing C-suites over actually accomplishing anything
It’s not unheard of in the medical realm. Slightly different but when Intuitive Surgical released their DaVinci robotic surgery platforms, a hospital system I worked with was early on their list. They also set up the demo unit in the cafeteria so you could see surgeons peeling oranges and then stitching them back up or what not.
Back in the early 2000s I worked for Cap Gemini in Birmingham England which had a part of the office that was some sort of partnership with IBM GS(I think IBM did the hardware and cap got the services contacts). They also had a big blinkin lights server setup in the middle of the office for clients to see. As a teenage geek in his first tech job I used to love going to peek at it even though I did tape rotation on the real servers in the basement most days.
This could cause a resonance cascade.