Two months ago at the CES conference, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang dismissed quantum computing as something that won't be very useful for 15 to 30 years. But on Thursday Huang hosted a roundtable discussion on the technology at the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, Calif.
The event called Quantum Day was a mea culpa of sorts for Huang to a nascent industry that holds great promise.
At Quantum Day, Huang said the idea for the panel came about after his dismissive comments at CES. He invited quantum computing executives to GTC "to explain why he was wrong."
"This whole session is going to be like a therapy session for me," Huang said.
Quantum computing has tremendous potential but is "insanely complicated," Huang said.
The roundtable discussion included executives from such quantum computing companies as D-Wave Quantum, IonQ and Rigetti Computing.
Other companies represented at Quantum Day were Alice & Bob, Atom Computing, Infleqtion, Pasqal, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, Quantum Circuits, QuEra Computing and SEEQC.
Microsoft and Amazon.com unit AWS also participated in the chat.
Quantum Computing: Fallout From CES Comments
On Jan. 7, during a question-and-answer session with financial analysts at CES, Huang said quantum computing will be useful for "small data, big compute, big combinatorial computing problems." That includes applications such as cryptography. "It's not good at large data problems."
He said 15 years probably would be "on the early side … for very useful quantum computers."
Nevertheless, Nvidia is working with quantum computing companies to advance the technology, Huang said at the time.
"We want to help the industry get there as fast as possible and to create the computer of the future and we'll be a very significant part of it," Huang said at the CES event.
When Huang heard that quantum computing stocks had plunged after his statements at CES, he was surprised.
"My first reaction was, 'How could they be public? How could a quantum computer company be public?'" he said at the GTC panel.
Quantum Computers Or Instruments?
During the panel discussion, Huang wondered out loud whether the quantum industry should "reframe" its machines as scientific instruments instead of computers.
D-Wave Chief Executive Alan Baratz pushed back on Huang's characterization of quantum devices as mere instruments.
Baratz said his company's computers already are being used for applications that require processing power that "go well beyond instrumentation and measurement."
"There are computational problems that are out of the range of classical" computers, Baratz said.
IonQ Chief Executive Peter Chapman said quantum computers won't replace classical computers but will work alongside them. "It will be a QPU, GPU and CPU working together," he said, referring to quantum, graphics and central processing units.
Nvidia To Open Quantum Research Center
On Tuesday, Nvidia announced that it is building a Boston-based research center to advance quantum computing.
The Nvidia Accelerated Quantum Research Center will integrate leading quantum hardware with AI supercomputers. It will focus on solving quantum computing's most challenging problems, ranging from tackling qubit noise to the transformation of experimental quantum processors into practical devices.
On the stock market today, Nvidia stock rose 0.9% to close at 118.53. But quantum computing stocks D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti all fell hard, continuing their recent retreat.
D-Wave stock plunged 18% to 8.69. IonQ shares retreated 9.3% while Rigetti fell 9.2%.
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