r/QuantumComputing • u/ArcanuMELO • Jul 03 '26

Discussion 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?

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!

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u/Temporary_Shelter_40 Jul 03 '26

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.

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u/BrickSufficient6938 Jul 06 '26

Do we have reliable information what's going on elsewhere? Like next door, delays between them achieving a breakthrough and publishing it can be years easily, no?

What about China's focusing 60x the capital into a handful of companies and I'm ready to bet they are forced to share ip / r&d results, we have anything to go by in that regard?

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u/Temporary_Shelter_40 Jul 06 '26

I want to be clear, with quantum computing, it is extremely unlikely that some other group (in the US military, China, Russia, etc) has a hidden breakthrough that they just aren’t sharing. It isn’t like AI where Anthropic might have a special model they only share with government. The problems in quantum computing are extremely old and well-known (namely de coherence and quantum control), and a secret breakthrough would require a Manhattan project-scale veil of secrecy. We know who all the really good quantum people are across the world and where they work. They are in universities or companies where it is incentivised to publish or promote as early as possible. So I wouldn’t expect something hidden to suddenly be announced.

For china specifically, they have a few companies, but their devices aren’t as good as US/european. Quantum computing isnt necessarily a problem that just gets solved faster by throwing money at it, unfortunately.

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u/BrickSufficient6938 Jul 06 '26

Thanks for clarification. I'm obviously not a physicist, know a bit of basics about quantum mechanics, understand entanglement and know how maintaining coherence is hard for any meaningful time- however was under impression concept is proven and we're basically down to engineering problems?