One of the most exciting areas in technology is quantum computing, but it's also one of the areas that's been among the least accessible, difficult to relate to the real world, and still largely buried away in the lab. To reach the point at which quantum computers become useful, there's still plenty of work to be done.
The race to a million qubits
There are, and continue to be, different approaches to building quantum computers as well as all the components that power them. But the goal among all companies and institutions is the same: to build a machine that can outpace the fastest classical computer.
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The cofounder and CEO of quantum computing company PsiQuantum, Jeremy O'Brien, was sharing his vision behind his organization, essentially saying that his team had attempted to work against a forged consensus.
Rather than scaling up qubits from a handful to 100 or 1,000, he said at the time that he was "fanatical" about getting to a million-plus qubits – the point at which experts expect there to be a meaningful performance leap.
New architectures and approaches
Intriguingly, O'Brien's comments came at a time when sheer scale and qubit count were the most sought-after elements in a quantum computer.
Since that point, so much research in the space has shifted not to the sheer size of the chips and how many qubits they can hold, but to building better qubits. Because quantum processors are so prone to failure, researchers have instead been trying to build processors with a few error-resistant qubits over millions of basic error-prone qubits.
The goal is still to achieve a quantum computer that can outpace classical machines, but experts expect that due to new breakthroughs, these quantum computers may need far fewer qubits than the millions we thought just a few years ago.
