Quantinuum's CEO says quantum computing could end up bigger than AI, but even quantum's own boosters admit that's a huge if

[AlexandrZakharyan]

Rajeeb Hazra, chief executive of quantum computing firm Quantinuum, recently valued at 10 billion dollars, made a genuinely bold claim on the BBC's Tech Life podcast, saying the area of quantum computing is, in his mind, as big if not bigger than AI once you actually look at the applications, and that consumers will touch its impacts in almost every walk of life

That's a striking thing to say out loud given how the two fields actually compare in scale right now. AI's economic value is already forecast in the trillions of dollars, while McKinsey estimates the entire quantum sector could be worth up to 97 billion dollars by 2035, a real number, but nowhere close to AI's current footprint. There are also believed to be only around 200 working quantum computers in the entire world right now, and unlike AI, which anyone can access instantly through a phone, quantum computers are still large, delicate laboratory instruments rather than anything resembling a consumer product

Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins offered a much more measured take, saying the potential is there but the jury is still out, and that early experiments suggest promise while also showing just how much more powerful hardware and further research is genuinely needed before quantum effects can be reliably applied to things like AI. He noted, half joking, that quantum computing used to be the most hyped technology he covered, until the AI craze came along and took that title instead

The two fields also share a less flattering similarity, both are currently living under real bubble anxiety. Mid-October saw analysts warn that some major quantum stocks could fall by as much as 62 percent, around the same time mutterings about an AI bubble were growing louder elsewhere in the market. And quantum computing has its own version of AI's hallucination problem too, error rates caused by how fragile qubit states are, disturbed by the smallest change in their environment, light, heat, or stray electromagnetic noise. Sustaining the conditions needed to keep qubits stable is such a serious engineering challenge that Elon Musk recently suggested, on X, that quantum computers might eventually run best inside the permanently shadowed craters of the Moon, where temperatures stay reliably close to absolute zero without needing expensive artificial refrigeration

The clever new tech that could make AI look stupidmetro.co.uk

[StevenArroyo]

Hazra obviously has every incentive to talk his own book here, but the underlying point about application breadth eventually mattering more than current market size isn't crazy on its own merits

[BrightRunner]

200 working quantum computers in the entire world compared to AI being accessible on every single smartphone on the planet is such a stark way to actually measure the real gap between these two technologies right now