Premature [LWN.net]

Premature

Posted Mar 12, 2026 9:49 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: Premature by PeeWee
Parent article: HTTPS certificates in the age of quantum computing

The real problem with QC is the economic: so far there are very few quantum algorithms that are faster than classical and so very few applications outside breaking crypto, so this is not get you money especially once post quantum crypto is deployed.

So there is little economic incentive to continue to pursue QC when LLM is getting all the money.

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Premature

Posted Mar 12, 2026 11:47 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

So there is little economic incentive to continue to pursue QC when LLM is getting all the money.

The QC guys are trying to hang around in the hope that the VCs will eventually figure out that LLMs are so much hot air, so QC can be the focus of the next big hype cycle. Much like a few years ago when the VCs eventually figured out that blockchains were so much hot air, so LLMs became the focus of the next big hype cycle. (The only problem is that once the LLM bubble has popped, the VCs may not have any money left for QC.)

QC, like generative AI, certainly sits in an enticing hotspot that combines “looks like innovative hot-shit guru-level stuff”, “seems maybe a bit lame today but will be totally, unbelievably, mind-blowingly great and absolutely indispensable in 5 years' time according to the people hyping it now”, and “fiendishly expensive” in a way that is hard to pass over if you have money to burn.

QC's hype cycle

Posted Mar 12, 2026 13:48 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The thing that could kill the QC hype cycle early is if quantum complexity theory can determine the relationship between BQP and NP.

The reason there's room for the sleight of hand merchants to hype QC is that we don't know how NP and BQP relate; the best we can do is to say that there are some problems (such as integer factorization) in both NP and BQP, that all problems in P are in both NP and BQP, and that we believe that some NP problems (like travelling salesman) are in NP but not BQP. But the hype merchants can argue that until Shor's algorithm was discovered, integer factorization was in NP only, and that there might be similar algorithms for a NP-complete problem.