Zapata AI Ceases Operations
quantumcomputingreport.com
quantumcomputingreport.com
Does anyone have context or can someone explain how payment dates can be arbitrarily accelerated?
It's never arbitrary. When a company sells stock it has a fiduciary obligation to its shareholders. With a loan, however, the relationship is adversarial. (EDIT: this is a loan disguised as a stock sale, so what I say below technically doesn't apply.)
A common clause in loan documents is acceleration [1]. The most common trigger for acceleration is default; the easiest way to do this is not make payments. But there are other requirements in a loan, called covenants [2], that a borrower must adhere to. (Think: a mortgage requiring you maintain insurance.) If a borrower breaches a covenant, the loan is in technical default and the lender may accelerate.
There is a third possibility, the callable loan [3], but that wouldn't make sense here. (When you deposit money with a bank, you're lending it money on callable terms.)
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/acceleration-clause.asp
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loan_covenant
[3] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/commercial-l...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1843714/000095017024...
Clever way to deny the borrower interest deduction in exchange for giving the lender long-term capital gains. I've been out of the game for too long to understand why one would structure a loan this way. Poor man's convert?
EDIT: I'm struggling to understand this. Sandia gave Zapata cash in exchange for future delivery of shares, the number of shares to be based on the future price of the shares. Also, if the price goes down, they get their money back. So far, we have puttable shares. But the put amount is "a cash amount equal to $1,250,000 (less the number of any Unregistered Shares) multiplied by the volume weighted daily VWAP," which makes no sense, because you're taking a dollar amount, subtracting a number of shares, and multiplying it by a per share price. I assume the underlying agreement knows how to do basic dimensions. (Also, VWAP means volume-weighted average price, so whoever drafted these defined terms is a numpty.)
EDIT2: Oh, it's a SPAC. They already had debt [1]. The agreement still looks overly complicated [2]. Given it's a SPAC it's safe to default to the assumption that any inexplicable financial engineering is solely devoted to putting money in sponsors' pockets.
EDIT3: Love that on page 6 the font randomly changes.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1843714/000119312524...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001843714/0...
> Because a VWAP Trigger Event has occurred, Sandia has the right, but not the obligation, to accelerate the term of the Forward Purchase Agreement at any time
ie. The share price tanked below $1 and that was the condition.
Lookup ZPTA; the price has been below $1 for 6 months.
Presumably the announcements recently did not excite investors and they pulled the plug.
In this case, as you say, the "daily vwap" is the vwap over the day each day, and then they are using the volume on each day to make a vwap of those over the longer period. I think. This is the kind of thing where when I was in securities the documentation would usually include the formula to disambiguate.
- missed payments on interests - failed positive guidance on going-concern - missed intermediate milestones (b2b contracts basically give you any possibilities legally wise)
Was curious to see how long that page has been that way, but it seems like the internet archive never found it somehow. Or maybe it's buggy because of all the attacks it's been under lately.
With this context, these "QM" companies are in reality, selling tech. that's even less capable than a vacuum-tube computer (much less a transistor calculator). Unless you care about simulating the hardware they have (for some reason), in which case it has "quantum supremacy" (lolz).
Quantum computing companies are selling research equipment and software for research organizations. It's a valid market.
Hell, even quantum hardware companies are having a really hard time building a functioning quantum computer, let alone a useful one. Setting aside whether it's worth investing in "Quantum" stock at all, it is quite simply silly to invest in anything "Quantum" if they aren't building actual quantum hardware.
Zapata's PR stunts like "Quantum AI" race cars looks all the more comedically delusional now. Though I'm sure no one's learned a lesson from this. No I am not joking, I wish I could make something like this up:
https://www.digitalengineering247.com/article/zapata-ai-andr...
Quantum software-only companies are sometimes... strange. Most QC hardware purchases today are made by either purely research institutions (universities, labs, etc.) or research departments of commercial entities. Either way, there are usually public tender descriptions or private lists of requirements.
When you look at public tenders, you will often find seemingly arbitrary software integration requirements like "the QC must support quantum circuit compilation with ABC", where 'ABC' is some product of some quantum software company you never heard of. Then you go research that library, and if you're lucky it's open source, so you dive into their code and realize it's another attempt at building a "universal" standard for some layer of the QC stack, based on some research paper out of some university. The developers of that library would often claim that, despite them having no QC hardware of their own, they can build better software for arbitrary QCs. It's strange and unlikely to be true simply because there is no such thing as standard or even common quantum hardware. There is rarely interoperability between architectures (and I'm only talking about superconducting quantum computers, not other kinds).
And then you have to either comply and tackle a huge integration project, or convince the buyer that the software you have written for your own hardware is actually better suited for your hardware than software written by people who never seen your hardware.
But in practice? On Earth, with our human society and economics? Hell, I don't know...
One pessimistic view is that QCs, being such complex and expensive engineering projects, will always be like flying cars: useful in theory, but other solutions are "good enough" and are cheaper. Quantum computers have to really, really advance a lot before they can actually solve problems better, cheaper, and/or faster than classical computers. The danger is that funding will end before we reach that point.
Another important point is that most progress seems to be in specifically superconducting quantum computers (IBM and the company I work at both produce QCs of this type). Superconducting QCs are very hard to scale; it's an incredibly difficult task to scale from hundreds of physical qubits (best chips today) to thousands/millions (necessary for error correction). I'd say it's more difficult than the task of colonizing the solar system. But there are other approaches to building quantum computers. One promising theoretical idea is topological QC [1]. Microsoft is betting on this; it it works, it may make superconducting QCs idea obsolete, like transistors made vacuum tubes obsolete.
I keep comparing QCs with interstellar travel because it's equally hard to answer questions about the possibility of the latter when human seemingly still can't figure out how to stop killing each other.
Anyway, I think humans made impossible things possible in the past. Splitting the atom, sending probes to other planets, landing on the moon, discovering new particles, etc. So I'm optimistic in general.
P.S. I gave a talk on quantum computing hardware & software recently; the organizers uploaded it to YouTube as unlisted, and want to make it public later. If anyone's interested, send me an email to hello[at]rakhim.org, and I'll send you the link.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_quantum_computer
The way you describe it it’s a big bet wether or not we’ll see QC working within our lifetime. But who knows… I love your optimistic stance.
Re other forms of QCs: what surprised me was that Sabine Hossenfelder of all people became more bullish on photonic QCs. Maybe progress will be faster after all.
I don't know a lot about photonic QCs, but it at least "solves" this issue: you can apply a signal on multiple qubits at once and you don't need to build a physical connection between them. You also don't need near absolute zero temperatures.
EDIT: sorry, I was thinking of trapped-ion QCs, not photonic!
The company I work at is developing (among other things) chips with a so-called computational resonator[1]: think of a long "bus" to which multiple qubits are connected. As a result, you essentially get all-to-all connectivity with intermediate state moves.
Sadly there is enormous illegitimate market involving naive VCs who have read too much sci-fi and are easily spooked by nonsense like "the NSA uses a powerful quantum computer for cryptographic superposition" or "what if the Chinese out-quantums Google? We call this a Heisenberg Arms Race and it requires lots of money."