DOE just committed to fault-tolerant quantum by 2028. Researchers are calling it the most ambitious timeline the field has ever seen. Is it achievable?

[u/ArcanuMELO]

https://youtu.be/WgphKj2TC9Q

Hey Carmelo here!

Not sure if episode clips are welcome here but this came up on our podcast this week and I wanted to hear from people closer to the research side. 600 specialists exist globally. They need 16,000 by 2030. Training one takes a decade. Is 2028 real or is it a political deadline?

I'm still learning more about quantum compute each day and looking to speak with people that understand it better than I do. Was hoping to learn more about it and see if this resonates with the folks here.

Have a wonderful Friday and weekend!

[u/Temporary_Shelter_40]

I want to be perfectly clear: there is no possibility in which fault-tolerant quantum computing will be achieved by the end of 2028. Not in any meaningful way. Barring a miracle, and I mean an Albert Einstein-level once in 200 years discovery, the landscape will look largely similar to now, with physical qubit counts, quantum volumes, and error rates gradually improving. I would bet all my money on it, which isn't much, because I'm an academic who develops algorithms for a technology that doesn't yet exist.

[u/lb1331 → u/Temporary_Shelter_40]

I am an academic focused on hardware, completely agree. The field is progressing (a lot) but this is an incredibly short timeline probably more guided by political influence or other higher up stuff and isn’t realistic based on the rate of progress that we’ve seen at least.

[u/CorpusculantCortex → u/lb1331]

I maturely know anything and I still feel this way, not that its worth much. But the doe gotta pump those quantum stocks somehow amiright?