I suppose it’d be in the details. Like, are they locked into that investment, or is it something with checkpoints and milestones that let them bail out after a year and a few mil? What’s the ownership structure of any new ip? Etc.
It’s easy to drop a story like this, get a win for investing in the future, and then quietly disassemble it as soon as the cameras turn away.
Or, it would be easy, if this administration didn’t consider laws beneath them.
Its all made up computation to fit the problem exactly. No real progress has been made in decades.
"Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog."
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/cheating-on-q...
This is just not true. There has been tremendous progress in the field. Starting with google’s experiment in 2019 on showing quantum advantage - admittedly on a useless problem, but quantum advantage nevertheless, to fault tolerant encodings by the Harvard group to recent demonstrations of a road toward advantage in generative models by goggle, to name a few. It’s still far away from running Shor’s algorithm to factor relevant numbers and break RSA and the like, but even there dramatic progress is being made, see, e.g., https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665
Then why are they also investing $1 billion in the same company as the taxpayers?
Because the startup is going to buy $2 billion worth of services from IBM.
I suppose it’d be in the details. Like, are they locked into that investment, or is it something with checkpoints and milestones that let them bail out after a year and a few mil? What’s the ownership structure of any new ip? Etc.
It’s easy to drop a story like this, get a win for investing in the future, and then quietly disassemble it as soon as the cameras turn away.
Or, it would be easy, if this administration didn’t consider laws beneath them.
Believe the announcement when the check clears.
Divestment costs
Its all made up computation to fit the problem exactly. No real progress has been made in decades.
"Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/cheating-on-q...
This is just not true. There has been tremendous progress in the field. Starting with google’s experiment in 2019 on showing quantum advantage - admittedly on a useless problem, but quantum advantage nevertheless, to fault tolerant encodings by the Harvard group to recent demonstrations of a road toward advantage in generative models by goggle, to name a few. It’s still far away from running Shor’s algorithm to factor relevant numbers and break RSA and the like, but even there dramatic progress is being made, see, e.g., https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665