Move Over AI: The Age of Quantum Computing Approaches as IBM Demonstrates Useful Application of Its Quantum Tech

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The mania around AI is singlehandedly propping up the stock market right now, with clear-cut winners such as NVIDIA managing to increase their market capitalization by astronomical degrees. However, while 2023 will always be known as the year when AI captured the financial world’s imagination, 2024 might herald the age of quantum computing, all thanks to IBM’s latest innovation.

Contemporary computing uses bits to represent transistors that can be either on or off, corresponding to the number 1 or 0. Quantum computing, however, utilizes the quirks of quantum mechanics, where a qubit – which can be a molecule, ion, atom, or even subatomic particles such as electrons – can exist in multiple energy states at the same time in what is known as superimposition. Attempts to gauge the specific state of a qubit destroy the superimposition, but the phenomenon does entail a probability curve for all possible energy states. It is this probability curve that is utilized by quantum computers to perform calculations that are orders of magnitude faster than their classical counterparts. However, such computers do suffer from noise and errors. It is here that IBM’s latest innovation comes into play.

Back in November 2021, IBM unveiled its 127-qubit quantum processor, Eagle. Today, IBM announced a new approach that it has developed in partnership with UC Berkley. The approach effectively counteracts the noise in IBM’s Eagle quantum computer, giving rise to real-world applications.

The research team first figured out that it could amplify the noise in a quantum setup via a process known as pulse