Hello World!
Wow, first post for this Brand New Thing!!!
So excited to share this with y’all — this is going to be very cool.
My name is Geordie Rose. You can read about my background here. TL;DR: I love theoretical physics, cats, and Diablo II hardcore mode.
I founded D-Wave in 1999. I was the CTO for most of my time there. D-Wave was the world’s first quantum computing (QC) company. We revolutionized several technologies, including dilution refrigerators and superconducting processor fabrication. It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2022 ($1.6B IPO).
I left the QC world in 2014 to co-found Kindred. We built control systems for robots that used a combination of tele-operation, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. Kindred was acquired by Ocado for $262M in 2019.
In 2018 I co-founded Sanctuary. You can see one of our systems here. Sanctuary’s objective is to build billions of AGI-enabled humanoid robots to do the world’s work. Our approach has been emulated by Tesla in their Optimus program, Figure.ai, and many others.
A Fascinating Development
I still follow developments in the QC world. A few months ago I read a preprint from D-Wave claiming that one of their systems works really, really well on a type of exotic problem.
Here’s Steve Jurvetson on the result:
Quantum Supremacy: An Entangled Tale of Two Paths This watershed moment — when a quantum computer outperforms all classical computers by an insurmountable margin — surfaced in this week’s WSJ: D-Wave’s “latest machine can compute quantities in minutes that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer millions of years. ‘Of all the computational supremacy claims so far,’ of quantum compared with conventional computers, ‘this one is actually the strongest,’ says Daniel Lidar, director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology.”
I don’t know whether the claim will hold up. But it’s not obviously wrong. I asked Mohammad Amin, the senior author on the paper, about this. He said he thought it would. Also Daniel is a smart guy. I trust the judgment of both.
A New Company is Born!
The kind of problem that the D-Wave processors solve is not clearly useful. But it’s closely related to some important problems in other fields. It is plausible that QC might have crossed a threshold with the results described in this paper. If the stars align, it might be possible to build real use cases for QCs where they would be the clear tool of choice. Before the D-Wave preprint, I’d kind of given up hope on the whole field. Now I’m not sure.
To try to answer the question of whether today’s QCs could be made useful, I founded Snowdrop Quantum Applications Corporation, or Snowdrop for short.
My daughter suggested the name.
Snowdrops are white flowers that blossom in early spring.
I chose the Snowdrop name not just because it sounds cool (it does!), but because snowdrops symbolize new beginnings, hope, rebirth, and the ability to overcome challenges.
They release heat, melting snow around them. I hope that Snowdrop will do the same, metaphorically.
These are snowdrops. They symbolize new beginnings, hope, rebirth, and the ability to overcome challenges.
Snowdrop’s Mission
Snowdrop’s mission is to take exotic problems where quantum supremacy might exist already, and try to build real-world uses of these where performance is better than you could reasonably do with any conventional classical computer system. I’m mostly interested in hard problems in AI (think Boltzmann machines and energy-based models!), but these won’t be the first ones I go after. I’d like to start by trying to show dominance in a clear-cut way on a more straightforward problem first and then extend that result later. A milestone will be to attempt to win the ‘quantum for real-world impact’ XPrize.
Along the way, I will develop in the open, describing what I’m doing (and why!) in some detail. I hope to provide a clear perspective on what could work well in the real world with currently available QC systems.
Glad to have you along on this journey!