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Comment by reikonomusha | Hacker News Reader

To add to this as a former employee of a different quantum company that provides cloud services, there was absolutely no funny business about faking results. If you asked for quantum computer results, you got them, and it’s painfully obvious too.

Obviously it’s in the realm of possibility that a company could fake, but I think if anybody was caught doing that, they’d tank their reputation within the community extraordinarily quickly.

I haven’t heard of any serious or reputable company doing this.

As for other things you’ve said, I definitely disagree with you and agree with the article that there is brain drain. That’s not to say every commercial entity is fully or continuously responsible for it, but DWave, IBM, Google, and every other company that currently or formerly over-promises or outright lies has drawn people out of academia into frequently senseless industrial positions.

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> but DWave, IBM, Google, and every other company that currently or formerly over-promises or outright lies has drawn people out of academia into frequently senseless industrial positions.

In those industrial positions, these people are afforded a place to do scientific research that is outside the university proper, but where they can still publish papers, collaborate, release the results of their research to the world, etc.

I think it's valuable, as not every researcher wants to work in the confines of academia. I worked in academia myself, albeit doing far more HN-poster typical things than a researcher would do, and while it can be an amazing experience, it's also a much lower salary, and you're not at all surrounded by the same energy, sense of purpose, and rapid pace of change. You're also dealing with lower budgets and lower expectations when the goal is purely to publish papers instead of creating actual, functioning devices that are not only workable, but eventually useful (which is a pre-requisite to being profitable in the long term).

There’s some truth to what you say but I think understanding that truth requires a lot of context and nuance, which I don’t think is easy to do here on a comment forum. On the flip side, it’s not all roses in the quantum industry. There’s more pressure (implicitly and often explicitly) to demo, dazzle, and deliver on “innovation”. Mass layoffs, re-orgs, change of management, hyper-pressurized funding rounds, investor and board pressure, CEO “realignment”, etc. all happen in this sector of the quantum biz. Entire departments—even whole companies—of scientists are funded to work with “industry partners” to solve “industrial problems”, problems for which there’s no published evidence of advantage. A scientist in such a department squeezes out a paper that’s of little, and dare I say completely inconsequential value from time to time.

> To add to this as a former employee of a different quantum company that provides cloud services, there was absolutely no funny business about faking results. If you asked for quantum computer results, you got them, and it’s painfully obvious too.

As someone totally unfamiliar with this world, I'm wondering why it's painfully obvious? Slow?

The results look terrible and incredibly noisy. Throw more than a handful of instructions at any quantum computer that’s publicly accessible today, and you’ll get noisy mumbo jumbo.

The noise characteristics are pretty signature-like. It’d be an engineering effort unto itself to produce realistic-looking noise models and simulations.

Sometimes the line can get a bit blurry. For example, suppose that as a convenience feature a service will automatically decompose sequences of unsupported gates into supported gates. And suppose the user happened to be providing sequences of gates equal to the identity (e.g. as part of doing randomized benchmarking to determine how noisy the processor is). Then the optimization pass would happily replace every single test, all of which are made up of equivalent-to-identity sequence, with the empty sequence. Fortunately it's kind of blatantly obvious when something like that happens, because the benchmarking results end up making no sense.

Optimizers may also change which operations are occurring at the same time, or insert spin echo, or add other unexpected error mitigations. All of these things can make the circuit work better, so on the one hand they're nice wins. But on the other hand they can violate user expectations, and make debugging and modelling nightmares.

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