Quantum stocks plunge after Nvidia's Huang says the computers are 20 years away

I'm glad to see someone speaking truth on this topic. There are lots of interesting things happening in quantum computing RESEARCH but it is all at an experimental stage. I liken it to the early days of experimentation with vacuum tubes in the history of classical computers.

If I had to pin one flaw on the stock market's valuations right now it is that it seems to have collectively forgotten the concept of "time value of money". Quantum computing may be very valuable, but it is certainly not going to be valuable for at least another 5 years at the best. Combine "money five years from now" with the high degree of risk associated with that (it really isn't obvious that quantum computing is going to be that useful, even if AI doesn't eat its lunch, and there's a lot of bites being taken at that apple), and that means that the bubble valuations aren't just as large as they look now, but in some sense represent a belief that quantum computing is going to be 5-10x larger, in five years, in actual, realized value, than the current valuations.

That's not likely. That's not just optimism, that's insane optimism, even if you follow the exponential curve in qubits the industry is claiming they're getting out for 5 years. Even if they suddenly switched today to progressing four times exponentially faster, you still need to account for the fact it's going to take time to write the software that uses these systems, including the fact that there isn't anyone who we'd really call "experienced" at that right now, time to identify the problems it will solve, etc. It's not like you can just drop a million-qubit system into the back office of a bank and expect it to suddenly just... ambiently make more money.

Project out the current valuations with the high time-value-of-money that one should probably use on such a high-risk, high-reward investment out to 20 years and it just gets absurd. Money 20 years from now is very low-value even before it's high risk.

AI is similarly just massively overvalued right now. Unlike quantum computing, I feel like there's a clear path from development to value, despite my general skepticism of it in its current incarnation. (But as I like to say, AI != LLM. I think LLMs are getting oversold, but progress marches on and LLMs will not end up being the upper limit.) But even so, the stock market is priced like that value is going to be trillions of dollars not in 10 or 20 years, but, like, yesterday. That does not seem to be manifesting. Net-net AI's impact on my life at this point may even be net-negative in that I'd pay to use the Internet that doesn't use AI to generate page after page of glurge wrecking up my results. Even just this morning I went to search for how to install a library in Ubuntu based on an error message about a missing library and the top page was a dead-wrong, completely hallucinated set of instructions for using apt to install a library that does not exist. High-risk money in ten to twenty years is not worth the valuations we're seeing.