What are the chances that the CIA has a manhattan project style quantum computer somewhere? I can’t believe that if the current SOTA could break commonly used encryption methods that it would be widely known.
You mean like Skunkworks when they designed the SR-71?
Or DARPA with Atlas?
Or the DoD with the global GPS network?
Or the NSA's ANT catalogue?
Yeah, the government has never had any issues outpacing the private sector. You only ever find out about it when they want you to. Usually that happens 5 to 30 years after the market has already caught up.
Airlines don't want high altitude supersonic spy planes, for example.
And GPS is a collective action problem: no one wants to pay for it, but we do all benefit from it being ambiently around.
The great quantum computing nightmare, from the NSA point of view, is someone sidestepping out of nowhere with a viable machine that works in an unexpected and easy to reproduce way.
Edit to add: see also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing which while bounded in the same sense as conventional machines would still be a game changer.
It’s sad to imagine the amount of smart nerds out there whose only actual experience with women is from the fking honeypots that Langley or ft mead et al use to make sure that some prospective AI talent on discord isn’t about to release a bioweapon. Clearly a lot of AI talent overlaps with incels and adjacent communities (see civit.ai as an example of this), It’s common knowledge that field agents skew female since they’re less suspected by patriarchal idiotic targets (they tout this in recruiting for DEI reasons). It’s probably smart for AI startups to tell their male coworkers to be on the lookout for random attractive women trying to talk to you. The US military and foreign service et al specifically warns its members about this and it is a clear and present danger.
And FYI, if the glowies aren’t doing this, they’re not doing their jobs, since the risk of some crazy open source AI person deciding to lone wolf society is rather high, at least according to the less wrong folks (that community I bet is also crawling with spooks). AI is so full of industrial and business espionage that I get scared just being in the space.
I know this is happening too because the private version of it, expert networks, are extraordinarily lucrative and rely on basically laundering of material non public information with plausible deniability. The “experts” on an “expert network” are basically private business spooks, ackin to a private investigator targeting a business.
Like other alternate forms of computing, the systems we build on CPUs today are truly hard to beat, partly because people are trained on those systems, partly becaus the high performance libraries are there, and partly because the vendors got good at make stupid codes run stupid fast.
At this point I cannot see any specific QC that could be used repeatedly for productive work (material simulations, protein design) that would be more useful than a collection of entirely conventional computing (IE, a cluster with 20K CPUs, 10K GPUs, 100PB of storage, and a fast interconnect). Every time I see one of these "BMW is using a quantum computer to optimize logistics" and look more closely, it's obvious it's a PR toy problem, not something giving them a business edge.
Possible, but I think zero chance they have anything more practical than Google Willow, which is itself completely impractical for anything except quantum computing research.
One of their big needs for production operations is having 24/7 support through christmas break, which favors companies like IBM.