INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
world take advantage of the new technology now
fund the corporate investor launched last year dedicated specifically to emerging areas like quantum computing and AI.Aliro is wading into
the kinds of complex calculations that cannot be handled by current binary-based machines, for example around medicine discovery, or
that have been built so far face a number of critical problems that will hamper wide adoption.The interesting development of recent times is
the emergence of startups that are tackling these specific critical problems, dovetailing that progress with that of building the hardware
Take the fact that quantum machines so far have been too prone to error when used for extended amounts of time: last week, I wrote about a
startup called Q-CTRL that has built firmware that sits on top of the machines to identify when errors are creeping in and provide fixes to
stave off crashes.The specific area that Aliro is addressing is the fact that quantum hardware is still very fragmented: each machine has
hardware, where quantum computers have no standardisation, even those based on the same technology have different qubits (the basic building
block of quantum activity) and connectivity
(The company is co-founded by Harvard computational materials science professor Prineha Narang along with Michael Cubeddu and Will Finigan,
that the company is not being specific with details about how its platform actually works
identify problems that they would like to solve; it will then assess the code and provide a channel for how to optimise that code and put it
into quantum-ready language, and suggest the best machine to process the task.The development points to an interesting way that we may well
see quantum computing develop, at least in its early stages
Today, we have a handful of companies building and working on quantum computers, but there is still a question mark over whether these kinds
provide access to them on-demand, SaaS-style
Such a model would seem to fit with how much computing is sold today in the form of instances, and would open the door to large cloud names
like Amazon, Google and Microsoft playing a big role in how this would be disseminated.Such questions are still theoretical, of course,
given some of the underlying problems that have yet to be fixed, but the march of progress seems inevitable, with forecasts predicting that
becomes as accessible as classical computing
This could have implications on anything from drug discovery, materials development or chemistry
