Quantum Untangled: Alibaba's Quantum of Solace
Restructuring in China, processors in Japan and a new error correction chip from the world's leading e-commerce company named after a rainforest.
Alibaba wanted to do everything. Founded as an online delivery business in Hangzhou, China in 1999, the company would eventually find itself dabbling with all kinds of technological platforms. In 2017, it founded its DAMO Academy, an “arms-length research affiliate…positioned around developing data-enabled technologies for fundamental business and social challenges,” according to a contemporaneous advertorial published by Alibaba in MIT Tech Review. Its founding principle, the article continued, was that the institution would outlast its parent company. Launched with an initial investment of $15bn and an advisory board packed with as many US professors as Chinese, the DAMO Academy would eventually boast 16 laboratories and go on to become Alibaba’s intellectual nerve centre as the company sold RISC-V chips and cloud computing services, bought up German data analytics start-ups, and experimented with cutting-edge IoT operating systems and AI models.
Quantum computing was another territorial ambition for the conglomerate. In 2015, Alibaba’s cloud unit founded its own quantum lab in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Three years later it squared up against IBM by launching its own cloud-based quantum computing platform for enterprise. These services ran on a machine capable of harnessing a grand total of 11 qubits, which put it in the top tier of practical quantum computers at the time.
“By introducing quantum computing services on [the] cloud, we make it easier for the teams to experiment with quantum applications in a real environment to better understand the property and performance of the hardware, as well as leading the way in developing quantum tools and software globally,” said Alibaba Cloud’s chief quantum technology scientist, Dr Shi Yaoyun. “The user experience offered on [the] cloud will without doubt help us further enhance our platform.”
By that point, the lab itself fell under the control of DAMO. Last week, the Chinese business magazine Caixin unceremoniously revealed that the facility would be donated to Zhejiang University in Alibaba’s hometown of Hangzhou and had made all 30 of the facility’s staff redundant. The reason? Cost-cutting, apparently — and a rather rushed effort at it, too. “At the end of July, DAMO Academy also openly recruited quantum computing scientists on its official website, and immediately began campus recruitment interviews,” said Caixin. “The recruitment notice is still on the official website.”
What does this mean for China’s quantum ambitions? Probably not a lot. While it’s certainly shocking that a major player in China’s quantum ecosystem has decided to quit the field, the episode tells us more about Alibaba’s priorities as a company than it does Beijing’s leadership ambitions in this area. Likely with an eye toward appeasing a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that remains permanently paranoid about challenges to its political power base, whether tangible or completely imaginary, Alibaba announced in March that it would break itself up into six separate units in an effort to become leaner, meaner and much more the e-commerce dreamer. That has also meant turmoil in those technology divisions it so lovingly nurtured in recent years. In May, DAMO’s autonomous driving lab was shunted into Alibaba’s logistics division in a new focus on monetizing its research, laying off 200 staff in the process, while new funding was ploughed into its AI division and reams of its research so far made public (efforts to spin off its cloud business, meanwhile, were thwarted by US sanctions.)
Elsewhere, China’s companies and scientists continue to make important quantum computing breakthroughs. Last month, for example, the country’s “father of quantum” Pan Jianwei unveiled Jiuzhang 3.0, a photonic quantum computer that local media claimed was a million times faster than its predecessor, Juizhang 2.0. Beijing’s interest in promoting quantum research, meanwhile, remains undimmed. According to CSIS’s exhaustive primer on the subject, China is pinning its hopes on harnessing quantum computing to supercharge its AI and decryption capabilities, investing $4bn-$17bn in a plethora of research initiatives to make that happen.
It’s enough to make policymakers in Washington nervous. In June, the Biden administration targeted firms aiding Chinese quantum research projects in its latest round of chip sanctions. Dedicated readers of this newsletter will also remember bipartisan efforts to resurrect and expand the National Quantum Initiative Act. Alibaba’s closure of a single lab — one which will be donated to a leading Chinese university in any case — probably won’t impinge on China’s broader quantum push. But there’s always a chance that US sanctions might.
In other news…
The University of Tokyo has teamed up with IBM to deploy a 127-qubit “Eagle” processor. According to a press release from Big Blue, it would be “the region’s first utility-scale processor” — or, in other words, one capable of tackling a new set of incredibly complicated scientific problems.
AWS is testing a new error-correction chip, reports The Verge. “We are still in the early stages,” explained AWS EC2’s general manager Peter Desantis (plus ça change), “but this chip represents an important step in error correction for quantum computing.”
It turns out that all your dreams of an immutable quantum clock were for nought. A new study from the Vienna University of Technology has found that it’s more or less impossible to perfect the non-optical measurement of time, a finding that imposes another natural limit on the functionality of quantum computers (as if they didn’t have enough.) “Currently, the accuracy of quantum computers is limited by other factors, for example, the precision of the components used or electromagnetic fields,” said the paper’s co-author, Marcus Huber. “But our calculations also show that today we are not far from the regime in which the fundamental limits of time measurement play a decisive role.”
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