White House Announces $1B Plan to Create AI, Quantum Institutes

The plan is pretty specific. $140 million to USDA. AI in Agtech is a highly underrated idea and deserves more exploration. $625 million to the work at "Energy Department’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkeley". NSF direct funding towards universities, per quote "The institutes will be hosted by universities across the country: the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas at Austin, University of Colorado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of California, Davis, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

Private funding in AI is flourishing - we absolutely needed this for our public and federal government institutions.

Like anyone else, I hope this White House leaves by November, but this is a unicorn effort they deserve praise for.

There are annealers that have thousands of qubits (DWave), but they are low coherence and very different from the gate model qubits in use by Rigetti, Google, IBM, which are themselves lower coherence than the ions being used by IonQ and Honeywell.

It’s all very much in the research phase so far. AFAIK there’s no reason to pay for time on any of the available systems (all <100 qubits unless you’re using a DWave annealer) unless you’re doing basic quantum computing research or benchmarking. Folks are working hard to make the small, noisy systems we have now do something useful, but the real moneymaker will be error-corrected and fault tolerant qubits. Those may be available perhaps between 5 and 50 years from now, depending on who you ask.

The Serious Work right now is to build scalable quantum architectures and continue to pursue error correction and fault tolerance. There’s also a shitload of work on optimizing control, devising classical architectures that will mate to the QPU, and so on.

Unfortunately, this announcement is mostly just moving around some of the 1.2 billion earmarked for the National Quantum Initiative back in 2018 or so. Unclear to me if any new money is being added to the pot.

Not only that, but I'd wager their ROI is or will be greater.

Last amount disclosed was in the area of $25B

If it were up to me, I would save money by bringing most of our troups home and keep them safe, and also use the money saved from closing many of the military bases in 180 countries to double down on tech investments.

What makes this almost an impossible situation is that we really need to do two things at the same time:

1. strong laws to stop the surveillance capitalists dead in in their tracks (read Surviving Surveillance Capitalism - a must read book, and basically a work of art in the sense that it is so beautifully written)

2. develop tech in a way that maximizes the benefits to society while mitigating the risks