Interview | Jerry Chow, Director at IBM Quantum Hardware System Development

Jerry Chow, Director at IBM Quantum Hardware System Development talks to us about the future of Quantum technology, the biggest challenges facing the Quantum Industry and where we are in the timeline of Quantum Supremacy.

Can you explain what your company does within the quantum landscape?

We provide managed quantum services over the cloud, including access to more than 20 of the most powerful and most advanced quantum systems in the world, serving an ecosystem of more than 370,000 people around the world—the broadest community of users in academia, business, and national entities.

What has been your biggest challenge in the industry?

There are still a number of challenges in developing quantum computing technology. At IBM, we are hard at work driving the most sophisticated and best-performing quantum hardware for our services—pushing towards our goal of developing applications with a quantum advantage, the point where certain information processing tasks can be performed more efficiently or cost effectively on a quantum computer, versus a classical computer. This involves driving performance improvements along 3 dimensions simultaneously, scale, quality, and speed.

We have seen the pandemic drive a digital transformation across many verticals; how is this impacting on quantum technologies?

Our users and clients have been able to continue their research. For example, since providing cloud access to premium devices to the IBM Quantum Network in 2017, our clients have published more than 500 research papers on topics across machine learning, chemistry, and finance, among many others. Meanwhile, we have found new ways to work and continue to make progress on our technical roadmap and deliveries. Even with the pandemic, this year we managed to deploy systems on two new continents (Europe and Asia) through an international collaboration and lots of time-zone juggling with Webex meetings.

Can you give any good real world examples of the implementation of your technologies?

We’re working with more than 170 organizations around the world on research to apply quantum to real-world problems. For example, Mercedes-Benz is working with us to explore how quantum computing can advance the development of lithium-sulfur batteries for electric vehicles. CERN is using our quantum systems to use machine learning to look for new ways of finding patterns in LHC data. And industrial chemists at Mitsubishi Chemical and JSR Corporation, which are members of the IBM Quantum Hub at Keio University in Japan, are using our systems to model and analyze the deep molecular structures of potential new OLED (organic light-emitting diode) materials.

Do you think quantum computing will augment or replace classical computing?

There is only computing. Quantum computing will work with—not replace—classical computing. We will soon tap into quantum computers for tasks that classical computers will never be capable of executing. But we’ll always need a classical computer, via the cloud, to access quantum computers, and classical computers to interpret the results from a quantum computer. For that matter, this year, with our Qiskit Runtime, we’ve made the interaction of classical and quantum computing even more efficient, providing a containerized environment to run full quantum jobs that involve classical processing as well. This allows us to speed up the total time to run applications, as an example, what took months in the past with a Lithium Hydride simulation in 2017 now takes only a matter of hours.

Do you see a continuing trend towards M&A between quantum solution providers?

M&A depends on where the value of a contribution to the technology lies. At IBM, we are building a global ecosystem with public, open source systems and software, as well as a network of Fortune 500 companies, startups, and academic institutions that can use our premium systems—and work with one another—to reach their research- and business-driven goals.

How are you currently sourcing talent?

We of course recruit top talent, and offer internships for researchers, developers, engineers, and designers. But we also host hackathons and quantum programming challenges all over the world. Some, like the recent Qiskit Challenge Africa, or our IBM-HBCU Quantum Center are targeted for certain geographies, or under-served student populations. Others, like our Global Quantum Summer School, and Coding School for high school students, are open for anyone. It’s critical that we meet the talent where they are, as quantum will impact a diversity of careers, from finance to transportation. Students at all levels should get quantum ready—regardless of what kind of career they want to pursue.

How far off do you think we are from ‘quantum supremacy’?

Wrong choice of words. Unlike “supremacy,” which suggests that a quantum computer, alone, could do some arbitrary task that a classical computer cannot, quantum advantage is the point where certain information processing tasks can be performed more efficiently or cost effectively on a quantum computer, versus a classical computer—but will be the result of quantum and classical working together to do something practical.

What industries are you seeing the most applications of quantum currently?

Quantum computing is still in early development, much like where classical computing was in the 1960s. There is still considerable fundamental research to be done. So, while much of the interest today is in academia, where researchers are publishing new research papers, there’s tremendous industry interest, especially in finance, chemistry, and machine learning. And to my earlier point about IBM Quantum’s ecosystem: academic institutions and industry partners are working with us, and with one another to publish research that is progressing toward useful, real-world applications in these fields.

Where do you seeing the future global centre of quantum?

Our IBM Quantum research teams span North America, Europe, and Asia. And we have engineers, consultants, and technical ambassadors all over the world contributing to everything from industry research, to helping teach courses at major universities. We also have IBM Quantum systems installed in Germany and Japan—the first such systems outside of New York. With cloud access to our systems, our ecosystem of individual developers, and industry domain experts can be anywhere, creating value.