IonQ CRO discusses qubit growth in the next 18 months

Please give us a little introduction on your current role and what you do?

As IonQ’s Chief Revenue Officer, I’m responsible for our Go-To-Market strategy and execution. Our goal is to enable customers and partners to address their most difficult challenges by leveraging our full stack quantum computing platform. At this stage of the business, we’re focused on collaborating with early adopters interested in leveraging quantum to gain a competitive advantage.

What do you consider your biggest professional achievement to date?

I’m particularly proud of building a successful customer business from scratch at Nvidia in the early days of AI. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to hire and develop most of Nvidia's US Industry Sales Leaders. It's deeply fulfilling to see them achieve great success. I’m very much looking forward to doing the same in the Quantum space at IonQ.

What are you most excited about for quantum in 2023? What predictions do you have for the year ahead?

There is a lot to be excited about! First, the innovations IonQ offers clients in application development, especially Generative Learning. Also, we announced that we are opening a new manufacturing facility in Seattle to build scalable, room-temperature quantum computers that clients can deploy in their standard Data Centers or access via our Quantum as a Service (QaaS model).

I predict, due to IonQ’s quantum computer’s unique architecture, which is already showing promising results, we’ll demonstrate remarkable resultsusing real-world data within two years. This is much sooner than any other quantum modalities.

Quantum computer architectures are very different, and our roadmap puts us in the front of the race!

Where does your organization sit within the quantum ecosystem?

We offer full-stack and full-service quantum computing. Customers can engage across all layers of the stack from the application layer to lower layers of the stack such as direct access to our quantum hardware.

We provide cloud access to our quantum computing technology directly from IonQ through the IonQ Quantum Cloud and are the only quantum computing company available on all three major public clouds. We also offer on-prem system sales to customers with demands that cannot be met through our QaaS offerings.

Our customers include many leading private and public sector organizations interested in applying the power of quantum computing them to their unique challenges

Join us in boston to discover more about the quantum ecosystem

Will 2023 be a year we come closer to quantum advantage for enterprises. If so how?

We continually move closer to quantum advantage. IonQ is leading this advance on two fronts. First, we're executing our technological roadmap and as a result are adding significantly more quantum computing power to our systems. Second, we are investing heavily in application development, reducing the quantum compute requirements needed to deliver quantum advantage.

This combination is already showing quantum insights in some areas. Today we see rewards from quantum machine learning on real-world client data.

What do you think the key challenges of working with quantum in the NISQ era is?

IonQ’s quantum computers offer clients many advantages, such as some of the highest quality qubits available to commercial customers and an all-to-all architecture. These lead to efficient quantum applications. Also, we have an excellent roadmap to scale IonQ quantum computers and the science behind the product is already proven. Scaling is a challenge on people’s minds. At IonQ, we’re focused on scaling up the trapped-ion chips by networking the traps together. Another challenge is improving the supply chain to manufacture hundreds of quantum comp

How many qubits do you see us reaching in the next year to 18 months? Will they make a difference?

At IonQ, we are not focused on achieving raw qubit counts. Our roadmap is anchored on being able to execute value returning algorithms to our customers, which is reliant on the quality of the qubits, not the volume of the qubits. Our measure of qubit quality is Algorithmic Qubits (#AQ). We predict by 2025, IonQ will have #AQ64 high-fidelity qubits (). At this level, simulation for bleeding-edge quantum algorithms and application development will no longer be viable on traditional computers. This is because 2^64 equals 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 usable computational states, which requires too much classical memory to manipulate, but only 64 qubits on a quantum computer. The high-value applications will need to be developed on real quantum hardware.

How do you think quantum will impact on cyber-security? Do enterprises need to be approaching this challenge now, or is that hype?

Although quantum computers are a number of years away from breaking RSA using Shor’s Algorithm - which some predict requires over 1,000 qubits - lots of work is aimed at meeting this challenge. IonQ is exploring this, too.

Several areas of cybersecurity are being impacted by quantum technology, including quantum key distribution, quantum randomnumber generation, and fully homomorphic encryption. Newer ways to maintain cryptographic agility are being developed as industries and governments transition to quantum-resistant algorithms.

I would recommend that companies plan to use post quantum encryption as soon as possible.

In terms of finding the right talent, how are you going about looking for the best people to work on your product?

Diversity in perspectives, backgrounds and experience lend themselves to new and creative solutions. At IonQ, we’re hiring Quantum Physicists and also talented people from various STEM fields and domain-specific backgrounds who are on a focused on solving the most challenging problems.

The cross-pollination resulting from bringing people together from different disciplines allows us to tackle complex domain-specific problems.

You don’t have to be a quantum physicist to work IonQ. We welcome your enthusiasm as IonQ leads the quantum computing industry into the future.

Do you see quantum as a service becoming a major trend? Do you think most quantum will be from the cloud?

Quantum as a Service provides customers with easy to access quantum computers so they can explore the technology and develop their applications. However, some clients, such as large institutions, government entities, and research centers, want their own quantum computers. IonQ supports the customers' desired business model; we have a cloud offering and offer our technology on all the major public clouds. In addition, with the plan to open our manufacturing facility in Seattle, we can build and deliver these machines on request.

A large portion of computing will be in the cloud, and for some applications, quantum computing will be an integral part of the workflow. It will offer efficiencies for parts of the application, such as more efficient Generative Learning models

How do you see quantum working with AI and machine learning?

Quantum processors are naturally suited for machine learning, deep learning, and other linear algebra approaches to solving problems. QPUs are linear algebra accelerators! Given that many AI applications also rely on linear algebra, we expect quantum computers to enhance AI applications. There are novel use cases that will require a quantum processor to be able to tackle.

Converting conventional AI techniques to QPUs is just part of the story. We are seeing Quantum AI generate more efficient and expressive models. In one use case, we saw a 20-fold training iteration improvement from a Classical GAN to a Quantum GAN and a 700-fold improvement using a natively Quantum algorithm CBM.

What are you looking to showcase at our show in Boston this April?

We’ll showcase our ability to drive near-term quantum insights across various areas, from Machine Learning to Computer Vision, Chemistry, and Logistics.

We’ll be sharing the application development innovations we recently published related to loading data into a quantum computer. Data loading has been a research challenge for many. We’ll also be discussing new tools we added to our quantum developer toolkit.

Who are you looking forward to meeting?

There are so many forward-thinking leaders participating in Quantum.Tech. We’re looking forward to conversations with them to exchange ideas, learn about their progress, and discuss possible collaborations to advance their work.

Quantum.Tech covers quantum computing, cryptography as well as sensing; what area are you most excited about and why?

We’re looking forward to discussing quantum computing with customers. IonQ is a client-centric organization. Our goal is to offer real value to customers by working with them to develop new quantum applications that address their challenges.

IonQ will be sponsoring Quantum.Tech USA on April 25-26, join them live in Boston here.