Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum Computer (NISQ): Comments on The Chinese Quantum Paper
Paper by Kevin Kane
There is a paper making waves in the media because Chinese scientists proposed a way to break RSA 2048 with less than a few hundred quantum computing qubits. This puts them within striking distance of being able to crash financial systems at will around the world. What some people miss about the Chinese paper is that people are now going to spend a year thinking of ideas that derive from parts of it.
The paper appears to be inspired by a 4-year old idea first put forward by Zapata Computing, Inc. That paper is titled, "Variational Quantum Factoring." Ergo, China is 4 years behind the U.S. in quantum algorithm development. It appears like China is winning, but it is not. It is likely innovations that go beyond VQF in the US are no longer being published.
When at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) people like Christopher Savoie brought forward the core architecture to Siri before it was an Apple product. Their approach gave birth to personal AI assistants. Among others at SRI, Christopher is one of the actual pioneers behind AI as we know it today. Without SRI there might not be a ChatGPT.
Christopher and his team now lead Zapata Computing, a company likely 4 years ahead of this Chinese paper making rounds in the media. An important backstory is this: Certain people challenged the SRI AI Personal Assistant approach and said it could not be done, or that it would not work. Well, those people look like idiots today. Those who challenge an approximate approach to using quantum mechanics to factor large integers will likely again suffer a similar fate of being made out to look ridiculous in time.
Shor's is likely already beaten. It is just not being published. As to why Chinese researchers published this paper, my guess is to send a warning shot to the US, and to make it clear that the losing side of history are those who are in what I call, "anti-quantum computing" elements in governments who fear its power in the hands of the public. While we should fear quantum computing being used for criminal activities the answer is to not slow its development down. Before there was Google people probably feared what would happen if criminals could access all the world's research to design weapons with it that introduce harm to humanity. It turns out despite this we are all still fine. These kind of fears are short-sighted and anti-progress. We should trust ourselves more. The fear is unjustified.
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