Well, the summer is effectively over. Time to get into the swing of the fall, a return from vacation and fun. It's time to get serious again about real work. I'm not a summer person, so I spent more time indoors and much more time than I expected keeping up with current events, geopolitical affairs, election-year politics here in the U.S., and on the technical front, keeping up with AI and quantum computing. I spent a lot more time scanning papers and reading and posting my own LinkedIn posts than I expected or planned to, but a lot of that was because I was avoiding the heat, humidity, and crowds of being outside in the summer. But with summer behind me, now I want to refocus on continuing to wind down my technical efforts, particularly for AI and quantum computing. So, going forward into the fall and winter, my intention is to further pull back in my online technical engagement. My overall technical goal now is "wait and see" - wait for the technology to catch up with my own expectations for what the technology should and can do.
I don't have any specific goals or metrics for the coming months, but some general guidelines for what can catch my attention:
1. Real progress, not just relatively small incremental advances. Something, anything that shows that we really are getting close to practical quantum computing, not just endless advances that still leave us far short of truly useful quantum computers.
2. Some significant jump in qubit and gate fidelity. Something at least modestly above three nines, for starters.
3. Full qubit connectivity for transmon qubits. No excuse for this deficiency at this stage.
4. 48 qubits for non-transmon qubits - and above three nines of qubit and gate fidelity.
5. A range of 40-qubit algorithms for analytical computation, as opposed to analog-style Hamiltonian evolution or other forms of non-analytical simulation.
6. Reasonably high coherence times and short gate execution times to support circuits with 1,500 to 2,500 gates. Enough to enable non-trivial quantum Fourier transforms and quantum phase estimation.
7. High fidelity quantum Fourier transforms for at least 20 bits, maybe 22 bits. Reasonably high-precision quantum phase estimation for that many bits. People finally starting to use quantum phase estimation.
8. Silicon spin qubits or Fluxonium qubits being competitive with transmon and trapped-ion qubits.
9. New and novel qubit technologies.
Something along those lines could capture my attention. Anything less... not so much.
Error correction? Not interested - it's just a distraction at this stage. Higher physical qubit and gate fidelity is what interests me most.
Tools and infrastructure? Again, not particularly interested - I think we're already over-tooled. What we need now is better hardware, not more tools.
So, my wait begins. Now.
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Executive Director, New Business Development Worldwide, Smith Micro Software, Inc
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