7 comments

  • lompad 41 minutes ago
    Relevant paper [0] "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog"

    [0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf

  • Oarch 4 minutes ago
    Something about the look of quantum computers takes me right back to the ENIAC.
  • throwaway63467 1 hour ago
    I had qubit bring up and calibration fully automated with Python in 2011 including full spectrum measurements, lifetime characterization, Rabi/Ramsey measurements, calibration of single qubit gates and two qubit swap gates and full quantum process tomography, so not sure if AI is really needed there, curve fitting and some data logging is enough for this. Even had a nice LabView like GUI but with PyQT, it was quite nice. Still of course cool, I guess today I would just let Codex loose on some experiment goals but in the end my ability to produce results was mostly limited by the chip itself and the qubit lifetimes and theres no magic trick AI can apply to make these go up by a factor of 10. Still would’ve saved me a lot of time for routine programming tasks I imagine and that seems to be the main takeaway of the article. I guess name dropping quantum computing makes this sound cooler but in principle it’s just automation that you can apply anywhere, nothing quantum computing specific here.
    • giacomoforte 51 minutes ago
      Even with AI you'd want the AI to be writing python scripts instead of following an analysis.md.
  • qsera 34 minutes ago
    Some body compared AI as something like a big boulder rolling down a mountain, decimating anything that lies in its path. After giving it a bit of thought, I feel that what humanity is doing with LLM is exactly that.

    The problem is not that it is super smart. It is that it is super dumb and super powerful. Like a boulder falling down.

    Humanity is like this bunch of utter morons who has rolled a big boulder up a big mountain and let it loose at the top, and standing at the bottom is clapping and cheering seeing it coming down, guided by random collisions in its path, and with real probability that it will land on them....

    • dude250711 3 minutes ago
      Let's go back to caves, this whole "civilisation" thing is not working out.
    • teiferer 29 minutes ago
      The right tool for the job. There are tasks for which LLMs are unbelievably helpful. In programming, used well, it can 10x your productivity. (Well maybe not literally, but Nx for non-trivial N.) I've seen really good programmers become even faster since the LLM is doing the grunt work for them and the code produced in the end is just as top notch quality as they produced before, just that now they are much faster.

      Of course you can misuse it. Produce mountains of unmaintainable slop, full of issues. But that's true for every tool. Before LLMs already, and there will be future tools too.

      So, careful with generalizations please. It's not all just dumb.

      • sreekanth850 12 minutes ago
        Many will disagree and say that anything done by humans is by far superior to anything done by machines. You don't want to correct them, do you?
        • ezlo707 1 minute ago
          Machines are extensions of man, it’s not man vs machine but man with machines vs man without.

          Well at least as long as they don’t develop consciousness of their own.

      • alansaber 18 minutes ago
        Yes I agree. AI has fundamental problems but a lot of "AI sucks" is the huge, trivial capability for misuse.
    • tourist2d 25 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • raverbashing 1 hour ago
    It will be fun if the AI realize that quantum is not needed and just simulate the results in a classical computer
  • Retro_Dev 1 hour ago
    I'd imagine that OpenAI would try to stagger their announcements, rather than publishing them recently close to each other. Is this because their previous post (about navier stokes problem) was met with controversy?
    • aurareturn 59 minutes ago
      I genuinely think that AI has accelerated so many different things that announcements from all companies will be incredibly common and fast.

      In my own company, the last 2 months, I feel like we've made more feature announcements to our internal staff than they can handle. AI has genuinely made us that much faster.

      In the past, making one of these announcements every month and the company celebrated. Now we're making making multiple each week.

      Not only that, we're making so many tiny improvements and bug fixes that improve the experience but we don't even bother to make those announcements anymore. They don't feel "grand" enough anymore. The goal post has shifted a lot in the last 6 months.

      • crashprone 28 minutes ago
        I apologise if this sounds mean spirited, I find posts like these making grand claims without taking the time to present facts that back the magnitude of these claims simply add noise to the discussion.

        You could've stopped with just the first sentence and I've would learned just as much as I did reading that comment to the end.

      • sznio 5 minutes ago
        > more feature announcements to our internal staff than they can handle

        have you considered the consequences of that or are you still drunk and thinking that this is a good thing?

      • qsera 32 minutes ago
        Which company?
    • Oarch 7 minutes ago
      At the rate this field is accelerating maybe this IS staggering
    • alansaber 17 minutes ago
      This is just a blogpost, rather than a major announcement (FLT proof was closer to the latter than the former)
    • ForHackernews 34 minutes ago
      They are desperately rushing to IPO before the bubble bursts.
      • zarzavat 17 minutes ago
        AI just solved a millennium prize problem. In a matter of days. Because of a rumor that someone else solved the same problem with AI.

        What exactly would AI have to do in order to not be called a bubble?

        • poilcn 0 minutes ago
          How these things are even connected?

          The current prices the largest players set for their models are not profitable, they bleed money. Eventually they will "fix" it. It could end up making their services less affordable and it could cascade other businesses and services that are dependent on them go out of business

        • dgellow 6 minutes ago
          You don’t understand what a bubble is. How good the technology is is irrelevant. That has nothing to do with an economical bubble. It’s all about massive capital misallocation driven by a frenzy of FOMO, which is specifically the case for AI investments. Economically speaking what is happening is the most obvious bubble possible, it follows everything that would be expected from a bubble where companies are chasing an ill-defined grandiose dream, based on a new technology we don’t understand and has very dubious ROI, selling some vague future utopia, allocating massive amount of capital to build infrastructure dedicated to a very early versions of that technology.

          As things mature there will be a correction, ie the bubble will pop.

          I would recommend to read « Boom and Bust: a global history of financial bubbles » https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/boom-and-bust-a-globa...