Gideon Lichfield
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Gideon Lichfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's a whole bunch of ways in which the history and culture of these two companies influenced their differing approaches to quantum computing.
IBM was a commercial company.
Its revenues had been declining for nearly a decade.
It was really looking for its next business model.
And so it was developing quantum computers very much with a business application in mind.
A couple of days before it came out, IBM published their own thing saying that Google had got it wrong.
They had two objections, right?
So one was that Google had actually just messed up the calculation.
Google said that it had done something in 200 seconds that would have taken the world's most powerful supercomputer, which coincidentally had been built by IBM, 10,000 years.
Quantum supremacy is incredibly specific.
You can achieve quantum supremacy for one very particular calculation or one very particular algorithm.
It tells you nothing about how likely you are to have quantum supremacy in anything else.
That's almost like saying, well, I learned to bake a lemon meringue cake.
Now I can cook.
It doesn't actually tell you if I've got any chance of knowing how to roast a chicken.
And so for it, quantum advantage was a measure of effectively of how likely that quantum computer was to bring them commercial revenue.
So when I went to visit IBM's research center in upstate New York, I spoke to a guy called Jay Gambetta, who still is the head of the quantum team at IBM.
This was after Google had announced quantum supremacy.
And I asked him what he thought of that.
And he gave me this kind of pained look.
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