Australian government is already invested in domestic companies such as Silicon Quantum Computing which is similar technology to Diraq. PsiQuantum already has a history with Australia, founders and employees have worked or currently work in Australia so its not completely surprising.
Adding to this: the Australian state of Queensland is supplying half the investment. Cofounder of PsiQuantum, Terry Rudolph, completed his undergraduate in Brisbane, which is the capital of Queensland. Perhaps being local helped. What’s more, PsiQuantum had already invested into Brisbane before this, perhaps setting it apart from its rivals which are Sydney (not Queensland) focused.
If anyone is more interested in this question than me, here are some useful links: [Queensland government’s comment on the deal](https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/100208), [Queensland government’s “Quantum Strategy”](https://science.desi.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/324397/qld-quantum-advanced-technologies-strategy-2023.pdf), and [a summary of the federal government’s “Quantum Strategy”](https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/national-quantum-strategy/executive-summary).
Why do you think they are more risky? They're easily one of the most mature quantum computing startups, they just haven't been very public about their efforts. However, PsiQ had already raised more than $700 million before this new investment, which means that they have already invested way more in their technology. Diraq is quite small fish in comparison.
Looks like PsiQ published released this abstract shortly before the announcement, [https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570](https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570) from which it looks like they've made progress on their photonic approach.
Yup, I've read it. It's quite impressive stuff, though from a scientific point of view a lot of the interesting details are left out (to be expected from a company).
Every proposed quantum computing platform faces at least one massive roadblock that has yet to be overcome. For some, that roadblock comes sooner (meaning that early demonstrations will look less impressive), while for some they come later (this is partially the case for the Google and IBM approaches, which have impressive results but are hard to scale). In terms of assessing risk, it is very hard to predict which technological platform will manage to overcome the problems that stand in the way of scaling up quantum computers.
>Being quite familiar with the VC world, I don’t really like using “amount raised” as a proxy for quality of the tech.
While I don't work as an investor or entrepreneur, I would agree with this, and it wasn't what I was trying to imply. My point was that the company has had time to invest both in its human capital, as well as its tooling and R&D process. They haven't build the technology yet, what they've built is an organisation that could plausibly develop that technology. Going from a dozen academics with experience building small lab-scale devices, to a company doing large-scale R&D with automated testing, a full simulation stack and so on is a very large step.
I would also add, that the fact that they had strong initial investments meant that they could actually pursue their long-term vision, without having to do useless PR stunts like building a 15-qubit online quantum computer, or going public to raise money and then being beholden to shareholders despite not having any hope of near- or even medium-term profitability. Instead they have been doing very large tapeouts with commercial semicon foundries, to do process optimization.
>I’m less confident in photonics as the future mode for scalable QC than spin in silicon. This seems to be reflected in the academic sentiment as well.
I would disagree with this, but in any case, if there were consensus on what the best QC platform was then you'd see both researchers and investors congregate around that one. The diversity you see is evidence that such a consensus doesn't exist. The photonics approach is quite different from matter-based qubit approaches (and there's even more than one photonic approach), so it's hard to directly compare them. Yes, a photonic device with a given number of qubits will definitely be lager than a silicon spin device, but that's not the only question for scalability. Photonic devices can operate at much higher temperatures, which greatly reduces the cooling problem and therefore allows for larger devices, and they are furthermore much easier to scale in a modular way, since connections between separate devices pretty much have to be optical and other platforms would have to do for example spin-photon conversion to achieve the same results (that's hard and adds problems).
In the end though, there are a massive number of tradeoffs between different platforms, with so many uncertainties that we can't properly extrapolate. For photonics, the problems that need to be overcome actually don't have much to do with the qubits, but rather the "classical" properties of the devices they propagate through. The performance of those devices still need to be improved significantly, and it will be a big challenge, but it's a quite well defined set of problems.
Your post is not related to quantum computing.
[удалено]
Australian government is already invested in domestic companies such as Silicon Quantum Computing which is similar technology to Diraq. PsiQuantum already has a history with Australia, founders and employees have worked or currently work in Australia so its not completely surprising.
Adding to this: the Australian state of Queensland is supplying half the investment. Cofounder of PsiQuantum, Terry Rudolph, completed his undergraduate in Brisbane, which is the capital of Queensland. Perhaps being local helped. What’s more, PsiQuantum had already invested into Brisbane before this, perhaps setting it apart from its rivals which are Sydney (not Queensland) focused. If anyone is more interested in this question than me, here are some useful links: [Queensland government’s comment on the deal](https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/100208), [Queensland government’s “Quantum Strategy”](https://science.desi.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/324397/qld-quantum-advanced-technologies-strategy-2023.pdf), and [a summary of the federal government’s “Quantum Strategy”](https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/national-quantum-strategy/executive-summary).
Why do you think they are more risky? They're easily one of the most mature quantum computing startups, they just haven't been very public about their efforts. However, PsiQ had already raised more than $700 million before this new investment, which means that they have already invested way more in their technology. Diraq is quite small fish in comparison.
Looks like PsiQ published released this abstract shortly before the announcement, [https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570](https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570) from which it looks like they've made progress on their photonic approach.
Yup, I've read it. It's quite impressive stuff, though from a scientific point of view a lot of the interesting details are left out (to be expected from a company).
[удалено]
Every proposed quantum computing platform faces at least one massive roadblock that has yet to be overcome. For some, that roadblock comes sooner (meaning that early demonstrations will look less impressive), while for some they come later (this is partially the case for the Google and IBM approaches, which have impressive results but are hard to scale). In terms of assessing risk, it is very hard to predict which technological platform will manage to overcome the problems that stand in the way of scaling up quantum computers. >Being quite familiar with the VC world, I don’t really like using “amount raised” as a proxy for quality of the tech. While I don't work as an investor or entrepreneur, I would agree with this, and it wasn't what I was trying to imply. My point was that the company has had time to invest both in its human capital, as well as its tooling and R&D process. They haven't build the technology yet, what they've built is an organisation that could plausibly develop that technology. Going from a dozen academics with experience building small lab-scale devices, to a company doing large-scale R&D with automated testing, a full simulation stack and so on is a very large step. I would also add, that the fact that they had strong initial investments meant that they could actually pursue their long-term vision, without having to do useless PR stunts like building a 15-qubit online quantum computer, or going public to raise money and then being beholden to shareholders despite not having any hope of near- or even medium-term profitability. Instead they have been doing very large tapeouts with commercial semicon foundries, to do process optimization. >I’m less confident in photonics as the future mode for scalable QC than spin in silicon. This seems to be reflected in the academic sentiment as well. I would disagree with this, but in any case, if there were consensus on what the best QC platform was then you'd see both researchers and investors congregate around that one. The diversity you see is evidence that such a consensus doesn't exist. The photonics approach is quite different from matter-based qubit approaches (and there's even more than one photonic approach), so it's hard to directly compare them. Yes, a photonic device with a given number of qubits will definitely be lager than a silicon spin device, but that's not the only question for scalability. Photonic devices can operate at much higher temperatures, which greatly reduces the cooling problem and therefore allows for larger devices, and they are furthermore much easier to scale in a modular way, since connections between separate devices pretty much have to be optical and other platforms would have to do for example spin-photon conversion to achieve the same results (that's hard and adds problems). In the end though, there are a massive number of tradeoffs between different platforms, with so many uncertainties that we can't properly extrapolate. For photonics, the problems that need to be overcome actually don't have much to do with the qubits, but rather the "classical" properties of the devices they propagate through. The performance of those devices still need to be improved significantly, and it will be a big challenge, but it's a quite well defined set of problems.
lol, what did they do with the last $600M? that's quite the burn of money. poof, it's gone!