
White House Announces $1B Plan to Create AI, Quantum Institutes - ajay-d
https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-announces-1-billion-plan-to-create-ai-quantum-institutes-11598432400
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alpineidyll3
Did you hear? All the sudden Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Halliburton are at
the forefront of AI and Quantum computing!

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tmotwu
The plan is pretty specific. $140 million to USDA. AI in Agtech is a highly
underrated idea and deserves more exploration. $625 million to the work at
"Energy Department’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Oak Ridge and Lawrence
Berkeley". NSF direct funding towards universities, per quote "The institutes
will be hosted by universities across the country: the University of Oklahoma,
the University of Texas at Austin, University of Colorado, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of California, Davis, and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

Private funding in AI is flourishing - we absolutely needed this for our
public and federal government institutions.

Like anyone else, I hope this White House leaves by November, but this is a
unicorn effort they deserve praise for.

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alpineidyll3
More funding is good. Although of the 625m at the nat labs contractors like
Battelle will take ~300m or more.

This type of feast/famine short term topical funding is usually a disaster.
Investigators will pursue the money, trying to shoehorn whatever they're
previous pet project was, then the funding will dry up and the main net effect
will be some shallow projects. Renewable grants are the blood of science.

A single center openly funding as many investigators as possible for 10 years
would be much more effective.

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AnimalMuppet
What is the state of the art of quantum computing these days? How effective is
it compared to classical computing? How many qbits can you get in a production
machine these days? Are people using it for serious work, or is it all (or
almost all) still research?

I'm not trying to passively prove a point. I'm genuinely asking. I figure HN,
collectively, will know the answers about as well as anyone...

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Whirl
There are annealers that have thousands of qubits (DWave), but they are low
coherence and very different from the gate model qubits in use by Rigetti,
Google, IBM, which are themselves lower coherence than the ions being used by
IonQ and Honeywell.

It’s all very much in the research phase so far. AFAIK there’s no reason to
pay for time on any of the available systems (all <100 qubits unless you’re
using a DWave annealer) unless you’re doing basic quantum computing research
or benchmarking. Folks are working hard to make the small, noisy systems we
have now do something useful, but the real moneymaker will be error-corrected
and fault tolerant qubits. Those may be available perhaps between 5 and 50
years from now, depending on who you ask.

The Serious Work right now is to build scalable quantum architectures and
continue to pursue error correction and fault tolerance. There’s also a
shitload of work on optimizing control, devising classical architectures that
will mate to the QPU, and so on.

Unfortunately, this announcement is mostly just moving around some of the 1.2
billion earmarked for the National Quantum Initiative back in 2018 or so.
Unclear to me if any new money is being added to the pot.

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jqpabc123
Meanwhile, China is investing so much that no one can even keep count.

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janhenr
Last amount disclosed was in the area of $25B

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zaroth
I think it’s just a contrast of approaches.

If you look at the portion of funding which is public vs private, I would
assume in the US the public funding is the minority, whereas in China the
public funding is the majority.

Total public and private investment would probably be a better metric for
comparison.

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cvaidya1986
Need 100X that budget

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mark_l_watson
If it were up to me, I would save money by bringing most of our troups home
and keep them safe, and also use the money saved from closing many of the
military bases in 180 countries to double down on tech investments.

What makes this almost an impossible situation is that we really need to do
two things at the same time:

1\. strong laws to stop the surveillance capitalists dead in in their tracks
(read Surviving Surveillance Capitalism - a must read book, and basically a
work of art in the sense that it is so beautifully written)

2\. develop tech in a way that maximizes the benefits to society while
mitigating the risks

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treeman79
After ww1 we went home. Then ww2 happened. We now have bases everywhere to
encourage others to play nice.

Attacking a country is one thing. Attacking a US base is another.

Agree or disagree this a good portion of why we have so many bases.

Lots of other reasons, good and bad I’m sure. But keeping the peace is the
driving force.

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rvz
Very good plan.

