Well, it seems the AI bubble’s nearing its end - the Financial Times has reported a recent dive in tech stocks, the mass media has fully soured on AI, and there’s murmurs that the hucksters are pivoting to quantum.
By my guess, this quantum bubble is going to fail to get off the ground - as I see it, the AI bubble has heavily crippled the tech industry’s ability to create or sustain new bubbles, for two main reasons.
No Social License
For the 2000s and much of the 2010s, tech enjoyed a robust social license to operate - even if they weren’t loved per se (e.g. Apple), they were still pretty widely accepted throughout society, and resistance to them was pretty much nonexistent.
Whilst it was starting to fall apart with the “techlash” of the 2020s, the AI bubble has taken what social license tech has had left and put it through the shredder.
Environmental catastrophe, art theft and plagiarism, destruction of livelihoods and corporate abuse, misinformation and enabling fascism, all of this (and so much more) has eviscerated acceptance of the tech industry as it currently stands, inspiring widespread resistance and revulsion against AI, and the tech industry at large.
For the quantum bubble, I expect it will face similar resistance/mockery right out of the gate, with the wider public refusing to entertain whatever spurious claims the hucksters make, and fighting any attempts by the hucksters to force quantum into their lives.
(For a more specific prediction, quantum’s alleged encryption-breaking abilities will likely inspire backlash, being taken as evidence the hucksters are fighting against Internet privacy.)
No Hypergrowth Markets
As Baldur Bjarnason has noted about tech industry valuations:
“Over the past few decades, tech companies have been priced based on their unprecedented massive year-on-year growth that has kept relatively steady through crises and bubble pops. As the thinking goes, if you have two companies—one tech, one not—with the same earnings, the tech company should have a higher value because its earnings are likely to grow faster than the not-tech company. In a regular year, the growth has been much faster.”
For a while, this has held - even as the hypergrowth markets dried up and tech rapidly enshittified near the end of the ‘10s, the gravy train has managed to keep rolling for tech.
That gravy train is set to slam right into a brick wall, however - between the obscenely high costs of both building and running LLMs (both upfront and ongoing), and the virtually nonexistent revenues those LLMs have provided (except for NVidia, who has made a killing in the shovel selling business), the AI bubble has burned billions upon billions of dollars on a product which is practically incapable of making a profit, and heavily embrittled the entire economy in the process.
Once the bubble finally bursts, it’ll gut the wider economy and much of the tech industry, savaging evaluations across the board and killing off tech’s hypergrowth story in the process.
For the quantum bubble, this will significantly complicate attempts to raise investor/venture capital, as the finance industry comes to view tech not as an easy and endless source of growth, but as either a mature, stable industry which won’t provide the runaway returns they’re looking for, or as an absolute money pit of an industry, one trapped deep in a malaise era and capable only of wiping out whatever money you put into it.
(As a quick addendum, it's my 25th birthday tomorrow - I finished this over the course of four hours and planned to release it tomorrow, but decided to post it tonight.)
Which tech stocks? Google ($GOOG, $GOOGL) is up over 5% YTD; Netflix ($NFLX) is up over 30% YTD! Your link mentions Palantir and ARM, but I don't see any signs of their respective businesses (selling database software to authoritarians, selling microchip designs) slacking off. I think that it's more useful to think of the current AI summer as driven by OpenAI and nVidia specifically. Note that nVidia ($NVDA) is up 30% YTD too. The bubble is still inflating and is not yet bursting; the pop will be much quicker than you expect.
I think that you ought to figure out whether you're a quantum-computing denier. Folks have been saying that quantum computing is impossible since the 70s, implausible since the 80s, lacking applications since the 90s, too energy-intensive since the 2000s, and requiring too many exotic materials since the 2010s. This decade, it's not clear what the complaint is. I'm not sure what you're imagining in terms of real-life intrusion, but IBM has been selling access to their quantum computers and simulators for several years now and I don't think that you've substantiated any evidence of harms.
(An anti-IBM argument will not work due to a very specific analogy: the reason that we have ubiquitous Linux today is because IBM was its biggest corporate booster, fighting an important series of court cases and plastering pro-Linux advertisements which vaguely argued that Linux was the buzzword of the future. IBM spray-painted "Peace, Love, Linux" graffiti on San Francisco sidewalks in 2001.)
It is true that we know only two useful algorithms for quantum computers. One is a generic speedup for any search and the other is a prime-factoring algorithm that happens to break certain specific encryption algorithms. Given that it is an open question whether cryptography works in the first place, though, we don't have any better plan than to avoid those broken algorithms. The entirety of post-quantum cryptography is about moving away from those specific algorithms which are broken, not about using quantum computers to perform encryption. Fortunately, the post-quantum movement has been active ever since Shor's algorithm was discovered, beginning work in the late 90s, and the main obstacle has been our inability to discover provably-good cryptographic primitives. It is crucial to understand that we cryptographers know that progress in maths and engineering will obsolete our algorithms; we know that the Internet only stays secure because people update their computers every few decades.
I'm not asking you to understand P vs NP vs BQP. I'm not asking you to know KS, PBR, Hardy's or Holevo's theorems, or even Bell's theorem. You didn't make any technical claims other than the common-yet-sneerable skepticism of Shor's algorithm, easily cured by a short video by e.g. minutephysics or Veritasium. But I am asking you to be aware of the history before making historical claims.
(Also, if any motherfucker starts repeating 't Hooft anti-quantum arguments then they're going to get the book thrown at them.)
Even if quantum computing isn't snake oil, I have a hard time seeing how pushing it can be as large a market as social media. Web3/NFTs and LLMs are riding on that particular bizmodel coattail. Investors can see "oh yeah 200M monthly subscribers for ChatGPT" and map that to FB and come up with numbers that translate to VC money. I fail to see how quantum fits into that
the key problem is they're selling Facebook and showing the investors a few broken vacuum tubes
you know that a VC tech bubble doesn't require the tech to be anything, it's just the excuse for a bubble party
extremely little of this has anything to do with a technology, six paras of ranting about "quantum deniers" notwithstanding
We literally have a generic speedup for any search. On one hand, details of Grover's algorithm suggest that NP isn't contained in BQP, so we won't be solving the entirety of maths with it. On the other hand, literally any decidable mathematical question for which you would have had to search for years for a witness, Grover can search for in days, as long as you have enough qubits. I don't claim that this is attractive to the typical consumer, but there will be supercomputing customers who are interested.
Who is "they", specifically? Neither of you actually want to talk about who's in this space for some reason. It's IBM and Google. It's incumbents that have been engineering for about two decades. It's the maturation of a half-century-old research programme. Your problem isn't with quantum computers, it's with Silicon Valley and the funding model and the revolving door at Stanford, and there's no amount of quantum research you can cancel which will cause Silicon Valley to stop existing. This site is
awful.systems, notawful.tech.BTW the top reply right now starts with "even if quantum computing isn't snake oil..." No evidence. For some reason y'all think that it's more important to be emotional and memetic than to understand the topic at hand, and it has a predictable effect on our discourse, turning thoughtful regular posters into reactionaries. What are you going to do when bullshitters start claiming that quantum computers can do anything, that they do multiple things at once, that they traverse infinite dimensions, that they can terraform the planet and bring enlightenment? You're gonna repeat paragraph 3 of 5 above, the one that starts, "it is true that we know only two useful algorithms for quantum computers," because that's where the facts start.
Also, I think that you don't understand my ultimate goal. I'm trying to push the most promising writer on the site into doing more research and thinking more deeply about history. Quantum mechanics happens to be a crank-filled field and that has caused many of y'all to write as if all quantum research is crankery. They write, "alleged encryption-breaking abilities," and you're irritated that I'm "ranting" because "extremely little of this has anything to do with a technology," while I'm irritated precisely because you think that this is a technology-neutral position and not literally part of why the TLS suite has to be upgraded occasionally.
I didn't get a message like "all quantum research is crankery" from the original post.
I think if you were trying to convince anyone to do things you'd approach it more convincingly.
You are correct, I'm just thinking they are going to push quantum like the next big thing to drive up stock prices/investments and use it to restart the hopes for AGI. (the LLM method didn't work, lets talk about quantum and hope that will eventually give us something to latch more capabilities, hope and stock hype on). Just to put my own comment into perspective.
Quantum computers are close to doing real useful work better than classical computers, but even then, it's not like most people or companies do enough work that's reliant on NP problems for it to be helpful to do BQP problems faster even if BQP is most or all of NP. Quantum computers will be an industrial tool rather than a household appliance, like an electron microscope. They'll end up used in places we won't expect, but most people will never be in the same room as one.
As far as encryption goes, things based on primes are already being phased out and will be gone before anyone can have their secrets stolen by Shor's Algorithm. The things replacing primes have been chosen because they're about the same difficulty for classical computers, but are expected to be less vulnerable to future algorithms that give quantum advantage. The cybersecurity industry sees quantum computers as a real threat, so proactively developed countermeasures. It'll mainly be historical stolen data that's never been broken that ends up at risk.
interested in details, and an actual claim for closeness
Quantum is very real, it’s not a bubble at the core. The good stuff isn’t being talked about because of national security.
In the netherlands we had a big cybersecurity grifter (who was invited onto talkshows while anybody with actual cybersecurity exp/knowledge went 'wtf is she talking about' it was really bizarre), who also claimed all her stuff was being done secretly and she wasn't allowed to talk about it so think of that when people claim these secret national security claims. (And remember talking about you having a secret which you aren't allowed to reveal is revealing something, so if people say this about quantum they are already a bit sus).
Who said that I won’t talk about it, they cracked all encryption, there ya go. Don’t believe it? You’re not paying attention then.
Oh yeah, upgrade to quantum resistant algorithms now.
User has been escorted to the egress.
Yeah it's all being developed in area 51, trust me bro
You're the second person I've seen this week asserting this without any evidence. That tells me that if a bubble like OP is talking about does develop, then superficial links to government labs on the part of company founders will be a big driver of it.