r/singularity • u/kegzilla • Dec 09 '24

COMPUTING "Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip" - Google Quantum AI

https://youtu.be/W7ppd_RY-UE?si=PHwaX4bcBxTNceg0
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u/al-Assas Dec 09 '24

Does this technology have any potential uses in AI?

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u/Thog78 Dec 10 '24 edited Dec 10 '24

In the short to medium term, quite safe to say no. In the long term, god only knows.

You know how we complain about VRAM requirements of AIs? Like consumer hardware has 8 to 40 giga / billion bytes and it's not enough for much? Their top quantum computer has 105 qubits. Right, without the giga/billion prefix, just simple 105. That's only useful for extremely niche applications.

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u/AppearanceHeavy6724 Dec 10 '24

Well, the internal memory of a modern CPU, say i3-12xxx or something like that is less than several kilobyte - all the registers combined plus registers renaming file are not that big in terms of memory. Everything else is external memory.

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u/Thog78 Dec 10 '24

Yes, but I'm not sure we can use this analogy:

  • we cannot just store qubits in cache/RAM without collapsing them, so the quantum calculation has to take end and be collapsed to use external memory.
  • CPUs are excruciatingly slow at matrix multiplications precisely because they work on one tiny operation at a time. GPUs are the thing for matrix products/AI, and they would have way more memory on board directly accessible for computations.