AI and quantum computers will be frenemies

In 2013 Google and NASA, America’s space agency, launched a quantum computing lab. The idea was to use a specialised quantum computer built by D-Wave, a Canadian firm, to improve the onerous task of training of machine-learning algorithms. Alas, the lab was ahead of its time not just once, but twice over. Neither machine learning—soon to be rechristened “artificial intelligence”—nor quantum computing were then mature technologies, as D-Wave’s boss, Alan Baratz, now concedes. A paper published in Nature Physics the year after the lab was founded showed that D-Wave’s machine was no better at AI work than a normal graphics-processing unit (GPU).