Accenture Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the management consultancy, hosted a Global Corporate Venturing roundtable at the end of August on quantum computing and the opportunities for investors. The discussion was held under Chatham House rules, so attendees, including those from Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Samsung, Verizon, Rigetti, In-Q-Tel and others, could speak at ease.
GCV brought attendees up to date on corporate venturing deals directly in quantum computing, such as 1QBit by CME and RBS, IonQ by GV and NEA, D-Wave by In-Q-Tel, and Rigetti, by Bloomberg Beta and In-Q-Tel, with subsequent deals including Efinix by Xilinx.
There have already been a number of applications using quantum dots, especially in photonics – which GCV reviewed earlier in the year – optics (CaiLabs, QD Vision), solar (QD Solar), displays (Nanosys), and bioelectricals (Doppel, Galvani).
Photonics is one of the fastest-growing branches of technology. It concerns light generation, detection and manipulation and provides a viable alternative to electronics, as it promises greater speeds of transmission. In an electronic circuit, signal transmission is carried out by electrons. In a photonic circuit, it is carried out by photons – particles that travel at the speed of light – thus generating a rate of transmission several magnitudes higher.
Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China at Hefei are trying to use particle interaction at a subatomic level to make calculations, rather than the conventional computers method of using electronic gates, switches and binary code. The Hefei machine, research on which was published in Nature Photonics in August, predicts the highly complex movement and behaviour of photons. Current supercomputers struggle with this because of basic unpredictability and difficulties in modelling.
When GCV visited scientists at University of Waterloo in Canada earlier this year, they said there were a number of approaches to cracking quantum computing. Some are problem-specific, such as those of Hefei with photons or Vancouver’s D-Wave startup, and some are more theoretical in trying to build universal quantum computers, such as the work being conducted at Waterloo.
Attendees said there were a number of myths about quantum computing as the ability to solve big problems, such as breaking through modern encryption, solving intractable equations, and replacing classical computers entirely, were currently unachievable. It seemed to be the consensus that these applications were 15 to 20 years away.
The most beneficial use cases today are aimed at cost reduction and efficiencies, for example, augmenting subroutines of classical algorithms that can be efficiently run on quantum computers to tackle specific business problems. High-end workloads, where classical computing is used today, will shift to quantum incrementally for speed, scale and cost, attendees argued.
Accenture Ventures then revealed its survey into quantum computing and found a general consensus that:
- It is not just for universities.
- Technology leaders are slightly ahead but its close.
- Barriers to adoption concern accuracy and cost.
The closeness of the race is encouraging investment. Accenture’s survey found 50 to 100 companies were spending more than $10m in the next one to three years to develop quantum computing.
It was not clear which corporations were the most likely acquirers of companies such as D-Wave and Rigetti, with suggestions ranging from US tech leaders to Chinese peers.
As one attendee said: “This is the beginning of a new industry opportunity to build a large vertically-focused business with partnership opportunities. If the Chinese can get through their security issues then they would be an interesting contender. Otherwise, the US will be the centre of the quantum computing wave.”
However, there is plenty of interesting research being conducted in China – such as the researchers who beamed entangled photons from a quantum satellite to ground stations, which made the cover story for Science magazine this summer – and in other regions, including the UK and Israel.
For example, one attendee mentioned that in cryptography there was an Israel-based company called Secret Double Octopus working on a password-free keyless strong authentication solution.
One of the reasons Peter Shor created the first quantum algorithm in 1994 was for factorisation of large numbers – using quantum computing to factor enables the breaking of security systems, such as the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman public-key cryptosystems widely used for secure data transmission.
The use of quantum computing to improve security is still early in the research phase, particularly in UK universities, attendees said.
However, corporations are keen to encourage experimentation. IBM’s quantum solution, Watson, is in its cloud – giving people opportunities to experiment with ideas, but there is fragmented usage – while Rigetti’s Forest platform comes with a Python environment to enable research and scientific communities to experiment.
Accenture has worked with quantum-computing company 1Qbit and biotech corporation Biogen to develop a quantum-enabled molecular comparison application that could improve molecular design to speed up drug discovery for complex neurological conditions, and D-Wave works well with graph-based techniques for molecule discovery.
And while drug discovery is a clear application, attendees said any industry that cared about the behaviour of molecules, such as materials science, was a likely candidate, as well as any industry that cared about machine learning and artificial intelligence.
There is much anticipation among experts about an important milestone, which could be passed soon. Attendees said 50qubit – a qubit is a piece of information analagous to a conventional bit – was a key number because current chips and computers could simulate only 48qubits. Attendees said: “If we crack 50qubit then with quantum computing we can do something that we could not do classically.”
