The Gross Code and the Grosser Question
Copyright: Sanjay Basu Is IBM's error-correction breakthrough a reason to pick IBM? Not yet. It is a reason to change how you measure. A post crossed my LinkedIn feed last week that I have now seen forwarded four times, each time with a version of the same note: "this is why we should standardize on IBM." The post itself is fine. It explains, correctly, that IBM's new family of error-correcting codes needs roughly a tenth of the physical qubits that the textbook approach needs. The forwarding note is where the trouble starts. I have spent a good part of this year pricing out quantum capacity next to GPU capacity, and I have learned to be suspicious of any single ratio that claims to settle a platform decision. Ten times fewer qubits is a real result. Ten times cheaper useful computation is a different claim, and ten times better than every other way of building a quantum computer is a third claim that nobody has made except the people forwarding the post. So this is...