D-Wave: Quantum Computing and Machine Learning Are 'Extremely Well Matched'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Following D-Wave's announcement of Leap 2, a new version of its quantum cloud service for building and deploying quantum computing applications, VentureBeat had the opportunity to sit down with Murray Thom, D-Wave's VP of software and cloud services. We naturally talked about Leap 2, including the improvements the company hopes it will bring for businesses and developers. But we also discussed the business applications D-Wave has already seen to date. Thom explained that D-Wave has seen success particularly with optimization and machine learning use cases. And he has the data to back it up: D-Wave's customer applications are about 50% optimization, 20% AI and ML, 10% materials science, and 20% other. Thom believes quantum computing and machine learning are "extremely well matched. The features the technology has and the needs of the field are very close."

"It's something I think is going to be a very productive use of the technology in the future because there's so many aspects of what the quantum computers can do in terms of the probabilistic sampling," Thom continued. "For optimization, the probabilistic sampling is like 'oh, I can do robust optimization with that.' But for machine learning it's essential for what you need to do. It's very hard to reproduce that with a classical computer and you get it natively from the quantum computer. So those features can't be accidental. It's just that it's going to take time for the community to find the right methods for incorporating it and then for the technology to insert into that space productively."

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So much match that quickly nobody understands...

[mspring]

... anymore what the machine actually does and why.

Re:

[Killall -9 Bash]

With regular AI, it is impossible to tell what the AI is thinking.

With Quantum AI, this impossibility is a law of nature.

I actually believe him.

[RightSaidFred99]

Judging from the complete bullshit coming from this company, I think they must have Quantum-AI enabled their marketing department. Fucking Quantum Computing, people still trying to sell that bullshit.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

We live in a world where you can take a dump on a canvas, smear it all around randomly, frame it, put it in an art gallery, and it'll sell for $1,000,000.

Re:

[gweihir]

Indeed. You just need to find the right kind of idiot with money. The D-Wave scammers have apparently managed that quite nicely.

Yes, yes they are

[Rick Schumann]

They are a good match because both are:
o Highly overrated
o Largely mythical
o A massive marketing scam

There's only two things that could make them a better scam than they are together already: Sex, and God. Then they'd hook pretty much everyone.

Re:

[gweihir]

There's only two things that could make them a better scam than they are together already: Sex, and God. Then they'd hook pretty much everyone.

What, no drugs? Now I am disappointed...

Re:

[twocows]

I think it'd be more accurate to say both are massively over-hyped by people who don't understand the limitations. They both have a niche (or niches) where they're useful, but people who aren't familiar with the nuance assume they can solve every problem.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

Right. And The Media don't understand any of it past what marketing departments from AI and 'quantum computing' companies feed them, and the general publics' eyes glaze over for anything scientific because they just don't have a clue either, so they believe what The Media is telling them. The 1% of us who have a clue are too small a voice to make any difference. Why else do people actually believe so-called 'self driving cars' are going to save humanity, or politicians and cops actually believe you can have

makes perfect sense.

[sonoronos]

Given that the original math the Geordie Rose presented with the first DWave was quantum annealing, and finding global minimum of an objective function is one method of solving machine learning problems, it makes perfect sense.

Extreme nonsense

[gweihir]

I see the scam is still going strong.

At this time there is no "QC" in existence that can do anything better than a classical computer orders of magnitude cheaper. And it looks like it will remain that way.

Re:

[godrik]

D-Wave is not quite doing quantum computing in the sense most people usually understand it. They produce quantum annealing machines. They are nowhere near as general and powerful as a universal quantum computer. But they are quite good at finding the minimum of complex math functions. So I believe the article, it is indeed built for ML.

There have been independent reports that D-Wave machine were quite useful, in particular from Google Engineers and Los Alamos National Labs. There was a /. article on that a

Re:

[gweihir]

I know that. But their quantum annealer is _still_ slower (and massively more expensive) than a classical computer running the best classical algorithm. This thing has one purpose only: Separating fools from their money.

And no, there have not been any "independent" reports. There have been some people that try to appear modern while riding along on the scam.