The Atlantic Quantum Team Is Joining Google

I'm not even certain that you need fault-tolerance to do ML with quantum computing.

Lack of foresight in AI? They own one of the world's largest GPU/TPU fleets. They have some of the most advanced research and a path to deploy products. What exactly else should they have foreseen?

OpenAI has the benefit of being priced entirely on promises. Google has a lot of realized potential, which investors always find underwhelming.

Google has led AI research for years with Google Brain and DeepMind, but they have been overtaken by OpenAI now, and perhaps soon also by other players who are building gigantic data centers. Google's core mistake was arguably that they were far too late in coming up with a model that was competitive with GPT-4. Now ChatGPT has likely more than an order of magnitude more subscribers than Gemini. At the same time, Google's search engine is increasingly replaced by ChatGPT, drying up their main source of revenue: search ads.

Recently one of their top reasoning researchers switched to OpenAI, likely leaking Google's internal reasoning secret sauce, if they even knew anything that OpenAI didn't. I doubt they will catch up.

To this day, I wonder if Google knew that they couldn't be the ones to unleash AI unto the world. They clearly had the wherewithal and expertise to do it (Vaswani et al, 2017), but were under so much antitrust pressure at the time that it seemed inconceivable that they could be the ones to introduce such a polarizing technology to the world. What kind of firestorm would have rained down on them if they were the first.

Or, you might think, if Google had the technology, and they knew how to turn it into a trillion-dollar product, it's beyond ridiculous to think they would just hand the win over to someone else.

The valuation comes from SoftBank and some Arab oil money that buy some $6b in shares, not from being publicly traded as Alphabet is.

Well, I don't think it's particularly related to AI, but Google has been known to make... interesting claims regarding quantum performance, at least once per year, to justify some kind of advance.

Google invented the transformer architecture, so I genuinely have no clue what you're talking about. Do you actually think they should have kept it a secret from the world? Do you think Google would genuinely be a better company if they monopolized the tech?

In this day-and-age, it feels like HN refuses to advocate for anything that isn't a monopoly. Are we incapable of imagining competitive markets now?

> Google wants to win in Quantum so bad, they have to make up for their absolutely embarrassing lack of hindsight with AI

Quite the opposite, they have plenty of hindsight. One might argue it's 20/20 even!

With DeepSeek what we found was that the moat wasn't that deep (pun intended!) and they may have lacked some foresight, they caught up pretty well.

Ya mean foresight?

Quantum hype will not replace AI hype. Quantum has already had its time of overblown expectations and has cooled off to realistic expectations. It won’t be cool or hyped again until general purpose quantum computing becomes a reality.

Huh, I've actually been pleasantly surprised at how much hype there isn't every time one of these companies with a quantum side gig (Google, Microsoft) announces some new paper or finding. They're usually accompanied by levelheaded press releases announcing what was done and why, not breathless hyperbole. There are generic optimistic statements from executives, but nothing like what happens with AI. I dunno, it feels to me like they're pretty realistic about what QC might and might not accomplish in the coming decade.

For QC startups it's a different story, but of course startups have to hype themselves into the stratosphere to survive, so I don't really hold it against them (or at least, not any more than I would any other startup).

I'm hereby claiming invention of the phrase "quantum larp," which may come in handy later (applying the MIT open source license for fair use).

> watch as quantum hype gradually replace AI hype

We already have quantum transformers [1], so the PR points are there for the taking.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04305

I doubt quantum hype will go very far. I sometimes talk to a guy who works in quantum computing. He claims that even if quantum computing becomes feasible, it will be mainly for very specialized applications. The wider public probably won’t be very excited about encryption or fluid dynamic simulation.

That’s very different from AI that will be applicable to very general and broad areas