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When Will Quantum Computing Work? - Tom McCarthy

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Quantum computers will create good businesses in the next 5 - 15 years, but not before then. Many R&D breakthroughs are required to build useful machines. I doubt the first great quantum computing company has been founded yet. Through the 2000s, quantum computing was a curiosity. By 2018, it was a Silicon Valley phenomenon; IonQ was founded in 2015, Founders Fund led a $50M Series B for PsiQuantum in 2017, and Google acquired John Martinis' research group in 2014. The technology offered huge, nascent promise: A new computing platform with applications across chemistry, pharmaceuticals and finance. It could be the successor to GPUs, or even more fundamentally: transistors. These were the days of 'quantum supremacy'1 A misused term, responsible for a hundred million useless articles. Preskill coined this ~2010. What it meant to the public diverged massively from the technical understanding. It was important to practically demonstrate that QCs are faster than CCs for some problems, but te

When Will Quantum Computing Work? October 2025. Quantum computers will create good businesses in the next 5 - 15 years, but not before then. Many R&D breakthroughs are required to build useful machines. I doubt the first great quantum computing company has been founded yet. Through the 2000s, quantum computing was a curiosity. By 2018, it was a Silicon Valley phenomenon; IonQ was founded in 2015, Founders Fund led a $50M Series B for PsiQuantum in 2017, and Google acquired John Martinis' research group in 2014. The technology offered huge, nascent promise: A new computing platform with applica

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