Why would QC be irrelevant? Quantum systems don’t perform well on all tasks, but they generally work well for parallel tasks, right? And neural nets are largely parallel. QC isn’t to the point of being able to help yet, but especially if conventional computing becomes a serious bottleneck, it might become important over the next decade.
I think that the only known quantum speedup for relatively generic tasks is from Grover’s algorithm, which only gives a quadratic speedup. That might be significant some day, or not, depending on the cost of quantum hardware. When it comes to superpolynomial speed-ups, it is very much an active field of study which tasks are relevant, and as far as we know it’s only some very specialized tasks like integer factoring. A bunch of people are trying to apply QC to ML but AFAIK it’s still anyone’s guess whether that will end up being significant.
And some of the past QC claims for ML have not panned out. Like, I think there was a Quantum Monte Carlo claimed to be potentially useful for ML which could be done on cheaper QC archs, but then it turned out to be doable classically...? In any case, I have been reading about QCs all my life, and they have yet to become relevant to anything I care about; and I assume Scott Aaronson will alert us should they suddenly become relevant to AI/ML/DL, so the rest of us should go about our lives until that day.
Why would QC be irrelevant? Quantum systems don’t perform well on all tasks, but they generally work well for parallel tasks, right? And neural nets are largely parallel. QC isn’t to the point of being able to help yet, but especially if conventional computing becomes a serious bottleneck, it might become important over the next decade.
I think that the only known quantum speedup for relatively generic tasks is from Grover’s algorithm, which only gives a quadratic speedup. That might be significant some day, or not, depending on the cost of quantum hardware. When it comes to superpolynomial speed-ups, it is very much an active field of study which tasks are relevant, and as far as we know it’s only some very specialized tasks like integer factoring. A bunch of people are trying to apply QC to ML but AFAIK it’s still anyone’s guess whether that will end up being significant.
And some of the past QC claims for ML have not panned out. Like, I think there was a Quantum Monte Carlo claimed to be potentially useful for ML which could be done on cheaper QC archs, but then it turned out to be doable classically...? In any case, I have been reading about QCs all my life, and they have yet to become relevant to anything I care about; and I assume Scott Aaronson will alert us should they suddenly become relevant to AI/ML/DL, so the rest of us should go about our lives until that day.