Why Rigetti Computing Could Beat Google and Intel to the Quantum Computer

@Rigetti Computing wants to create a whole new type of computer that uses quantum physics to supercharge #artificialintelligence. The startup, based out of Berkeley, California, is facing off against @Google, @IBM and @Intel, all of which are aiming to build a stable #quantumcomputer. The first company to pull it off effectively could see itself at the heart of a computing revolution, and there’s reason to think Rigetti could get there first. “This is going to be a very large industry—every major organization in the world will have to have a strategy for how to use this technology,” Chad Rigetti, the 38-year-old founder of the company, told Wired in June. Unlike regular computers, which store information in bits made up of either zeros and ones, quantum machines can use both zero and one at the same time in what’s called a “qubit.” It sounds like a small change, but it enables computers to run more tasks at once. Just 50 qubits can represent 10,000,000,000,000,000 numbers, a scale a regular computer would need petabytes of data to hold. This could lead to a big shift in power. Yuri van Geest, founder of SingularityU in the Netherlands and an expert in the singularity, said at last year’s Pirate Summit in Cologne, Germany, that a quantum computer will be built that has the same computational power as every computer on earth today combined. It could lead to a “new era on this planet,” as analytical jobs fall aside in the face of ultra-powerful machines. There’s a big reward up for grabs to the first company that harnesses this. Intel’s director of quantum hardware, Jim Clarke, holds the new 17-qubit superconducting test chip. Google and Intel have both experimented with quantum computers to varying results. Google recently announced that it will be ready to show “quantum supremacy” — a machine that is better than a regular computer at specific tasks — in a matter of months, and it’s conducted experiments with nine qubit systems. At the same time, Intel has taken the wraps off a 17-qubit chip, but it requires a temperature 250 times colder than deep space to operate effectively. But Rigetti is taking a different approach. The startup, which has around 80 employees and $70 million in funding, is building a business from scratch geared around quantum computers.

https://www.inverse.com/article/38424-rigetti-quantum-computer-could-beat-google-intel