Opening Talk & Interview | 100th World & 50th Thai Quantum S&T Anniversary | “IBM System 2: Modular Quantum Computer” | by Dr. Nicholas T Bronn - IBM Research | Feb 4, 2025 | #IYQ2025 & #ThaiYQ2025

K Sripimanwat

4 ก.พ.

Opening Talk & Interview

100th World & 50th Thai Quantum S&T Anniversary

#IYQ2025 & #ThaiYQ2025

#QuantumFuture #QuantumYear #WorldQuantum100 #ThaiQuantum50 #QuantumFuture #QuantumYear

by Dr. Nicholas T Bronn - IBM

February 4, 2025

A) Video “IBM Quantum Computer System 2: Modular Quantum Computer”

(Operating at the cutting edge of scientific discovery with the most performant utility-scale quantum computing technology)

B) 2025 - Talk with Nicholas T Bronn (IBM)

Interviewed by K Sripimanwat

IEEE Thailand Section Quantum IT group

Happy new year 2025 and welcome back to talk with Q-Thai.Org forum.

Q1) In the past year 2024, there was extremely contradicted news on ‘quantum computer’ itself. At early of the year, the New York Stock Exchange warned over possible delisting of started up companies (SPAC) due to low stock price under $1. However, from the last quarter through this new 2025 year “Quantum Drama” has been unfolding. Those warned stocks prices jumped to over $40 among important quotes such as; ’bold prediction’ ‘harsh reality’ ‘dead wrong’ and 'good luck’, for examples.

A year before, Gartner mentioned on February 2023 that "The quantum segment is also highly fragmented with an estimated 600+ startups and some established companies currently operating in the space" and "This level of market activity is unusual and unsustainable for a market segment that currently does not deliver business value".

From IBM point of view, what is really happening in this quantum computing industry ? And what would you predict for the next episode of this phenomenon or drama through the rest of 2025 year ?

Answer (Nicholas): The quantum computing industry remains strong in general, with many companies expanding their offerings and hitting their milestones. While I cannot speak for IBM, my sense is the market turbulence was mainly caused by a number of startups that went public via merging with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) during the post-pandemic time of easy money, and higher interest rates have reduced the appetite for investment. I also think this is a symptom of tech in general, and we have also recently seen huge swings in the value of AI-related companies on the arrival of DeepSeek right along with turbulence in quantum startup prices with the popularization of Google’s recent quantum error correction result and comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about his long time horizon of useful quantum computers.

Q2) Five years after your talk in 2019 in Bangkok now, please update us overall of IBM quantum computing; progress, investment, on going and coming milestones.

Answer: Well there has been quite a bit going on in those 5 years, so perhaps I’ll stick to 5 highlights:

IBM Quantum researchers have performed an experiment that produced results beyond what can be computed classically by brute force methods. These results are in the same range a number of tensor network approximate calculations, ushering in what we call the era of “quantum utility.”
The VP of IBM Quantum announced that quantum advantage will happen by 2026.
The IBM Quantum roadmap has been updated and in the near term we are building bigger devices by integrating our advanced Heron 156-qubit processors together. In the longer term, we are highlighting the development of an error corrected quantum computer by the end of the decade.
Qiskit released its first stable version (Qiskit 1.0), and has had many internals refactored in the Rust programming language for increased (and currently leading all quantum SDKs in) performance.
Sample-based algorithms that rely on a combination of quantum processing units and high-performance classical compute have been successfully used to tackle large problems in materials science and chemistry.

Q3) In 2024, big tech players in datacenter, AI, and chips, have poured billions of dollars into to ASEAN countries. Many CEO trips were with a number of MOU signing ceremonies. Regarding future of IBM quantum computing business, is there any possibility of similar collaboration with south east Asian country, and what that economic zone should prepare for ? We are looking for IBM insight.

Answer: While this does not represent the views of IBM, I think one could look to see where the biggest quantum ecosystems in the ASEAN countries are to get a sense. With the Centre for Quantum Technology and well-known startups in Singapore, that seems like an obvious first choice. Perhaps Thailand could be the second.

Q4) Obviously worldwide, the quantum computing rhetoric are on business news, from political campaign, and also spread from R&D funding seekers. Most are resulted to techno-hype/ PR move, manipulation, and over sell. It seems like we are all surrounding by many “dead & alive” Schrödinger's cats in real life or both sides of information released at the same time such as; “10k-year calculation in just 200 seconds” vs “The current state of the art is that no experiments have demonstrated quantum advantage for practical tasks yet.”

Those rhetorics sparked to various societies. A number business on fake or fabricated quantum market reports have been pumping up. Science communication is sadly weak while pseudoscience spreading widely, misleading agendas are also merged into academia, industry, also policy, and so on.

How people could really find trusted sources for their future business or study. Please suggest.

Answer: It is true that the amount of hype has only increased over time in this field, and some of this has to do with the exact terminology being used. For example, even our so-call utility experiment is not useful in producing valuable results but rather showed that quantum calculations can be performed beyond brute force classical computation. We take quantum advantage to mean producing a useful result that cannot be produced otherwise, and look to materials science or chemistry for that result in 2026.

For quantum science communication in general, I cultivate a community of blogs, scientific journals, and science news websites. Some popular choices are Scott Aaronson’s Shtetl Optimized blog and Quanta Magazine, but I should also warn that bloggers often disagree with each other and occasionally magazine articles get published to the chagrin of the community. One could also cultivate a list of sources not to trust ;)

Q5) Technically, a popular quote or claim on quantum computing advantage as to break RSA encryption in very short time by efficiently factoring large numbers using Shor's algorithm, then our IT security will be at high risk. However, for the practical, not just theoretical concept, it has been in doubt for quite a long time. This is, not only to convince people on realization to the potential of quantum computing but also to prevent them from misleading, therefore real demo on cryptology breaking is highly important. People then could prove by him/ herself instead of listening to the threatening solely. What about the latest progress of that practical code breaking algorithm by using quantum computer ?

Answer: Shor’s algorithm is a very difficult algorithm to run even for an error corrected quantum computer, with estimates in the area of 6k-25k logical qubits needed to factor RSA 2048. In our current era of noisy quantum computers, before the arrival of quantum error correction, more research is performed on noise-tolerant quantum algorithms that can produce results over the implementation of “textbook algorithms” that have no hope of being useful anytime soon. With the coming of quantum error corrected computers late in the decade, this approach may make sense, but it might not be something you want to wait to address.

Q6: Recall to your last visit to Thailand in 2019, at the same year, a national quantum policy on ‘frontier research’ was kicked off before the coming COVID 19. Once we recovered from the pandemic and found that there was an official report already announced during locking down in 2020. It is “the national quantum technology roadmap (2020 — 2029)”. That ten years plan contains extremely weird information and stunned people for years. Starting from proposing quantum internet for every household (2025), quantum tech to secure private information, quantum algorithms on borrower ratings and bad debt opportunities for banking & finance businesses, also they would adopt quantum tech through the earthquake warnings system, and for the “Animal Health !”. A new mutated form of Schrödinger's cat has raised alarm on our land.

Then, during this IYQ2025 & Thai YQ2025 year, or the 100th & 50th anniversary of worldwide and Thai quantum S&T, we are inviting and gathering people with a positive attitude in order to help polishing that roadmap. Along the coming short and winding road of its second half (2025 - 2029), we also highly aim to immune new generation from re-infections with any future techno-hype, pseudoscience, or fake tech.

The thing is, is there any related experience similar to this complicated story you have faced before ? And what would you recommend for our young people & scientists ? All will benefit as ‘inactivated vaccine’ to them. Thank you very much.

Answer: Haha, I actually think about this quite a bit because I moved from quantum hardware to algorithms in 2020, and back then most people were trying to figure out use cases for quantum computing. And quantum algorithms were developed that can cover a wide range of optimization and machine learning problems, for example. So in some sense, one could say quantum computers can solve all these problems because the algorithms exist, but the problem is that not a lot of these algorithms are conducive to running on noisy quantum hardware. We are currently considering algorithms that scale well to larger problems sizes on current quantum computers, which do include optimization and quantum machine learning algorithms, but certainly not all of them. Now that we’re in the era of utility and researchers are commonly running 100+ qubit experiments, I think the field is concentrating much more on this line of study.

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