The world might explode again, shortly
ygbfkm - a quantum hardware startup!
Usable quantum hardware is closer than ever, and it has absolutely nothing to do with science.
I read this article over the weekend, and this phrase floored me: “quantum hardware startup.”[1] I didn’t think there were quantum hardware startups! Software, sure; we invested in one. But hardware? Most of these things are gigantic, multimillion (billion?) dollar hardware systems that are maintained and cooled by other multimillion dollar systems.
Not to be overdramatic, but I do think this changes everything. If we are now in a position where a quantum hardware startup can exist, we will see an acceleration in this space unlike any in the past.
It isn’t quite true to say that big, legacy companies cannot innovate. After all, the GUI was invented at Xerox and LLMs at Google. What these companies, cannot do, however, is bring those innovations to market in any kind of efficient way. In some cases, the innovations are accidental—geniuses simply forgotten about by management and left to do their own thing (Xerox, Bell Labs). In others, they’re deliberately blocked because the innovations threaten existing revenue streams.
The latter is, of course, what happened at Google and Apple recently. At Google, LLMs were (and are!) a huge threat to the existing search business that makes billions of dollars tricking users into clicking ads for malware-laced PDF readers instead of sending them to Adobe for the free one. It took startups like OpenAI and Anthropic to force Google to release Gemini. Meanwhile, Apple’s Vision Pro could have been transformative, but their (admittedly extroadinarily profitable) business model of fleecing developers for 30% meant that no sane developer wanted to build for it.
One reason that hardware moves so much slower than software is because, often, the only possible innovators are large, well-capitalized companies. That’s the heart of the “we were promised flying cars but got Facebook” tech critique. And yet, we now have a startup that claims to have made a breakthrough in one of the most challenging hardware problems out there. If this turns out to be real, it will flip the table. Even if the ultimate innovation happens inside a larger company, the specter of a startup’s nipping at their heels means that there will be corporate incentives to move quickly and bring products to market.
A quantum hardware startup. That is just so incredibly cool.
I don’t pretend to understand the details of the innovation itself; I think there are literally a few thousand people in the world who really understand quantum computing, and regrettably, I am not one of them. ↩︎