VentureBeat: Do you think people are becoming aware of what you’re doing?
Earl: It’s a tricky thing. On the one hand, this technology is revolutionary. It’s going to change the world. But it’s easy for people to see that as hype. So, on the one hand, people come into it and they’re naturally skeptical about these claims. This sounds really exciting — a little too exciting. Then, they get mired in the quantum mechanics, which is very counter-intuitive. It’s easy to form an opinion that this is hype, not real, not technically feasible. The complexity of it scares a lot of people off.
However, enough companies are springing up, with enough momentum building. We’re seeing successes in near-term applications that people are targeting. People are digging a bit deeper and coming to grips with the fact that this is going to be the next revolution. Quantum-enabled products are coming. We’re going to see the market explode pretty soon.
We’re ahead of that market, ahead of the curve. We have some challenges educating the investment community about what the revolution is going to look like. But we’re seeing more traction over the last 12 months as people start to understand the implications and take [things] more seriously.
VentureBeat: What’s a glimpse of the future that you’re excited about?
Earl: You also cover video games. That’s a good example. Right now there’s a massive amount of processing that goes into games, a lot of it relating to graphics and AI. Those areas specifically should see significant benefits from quantum computing.
When you look at graphics processing — 3D rendering and things like that — it’s just a bunch of simple equations done over and over again. That’s something quantum computing can help with. As you look at what something like the Xbox One is doing, where they’re using cloud processing to speed up things like graphics and AI, you could envision that here as well. You could have a really fast quantum computer out there in the cloud — and by fast I mean billions of times faster — that’s doing most of the processing for very realistic video games.
Almost more exciting than graphics, though, is the artificial intelligence. AI has always struggled. We had these cool ideas where we were going to be talking to our computers, and they were going to read our body language and interact with us on a language level, connecting to us in a very human way. Those have never happened. Part of the limitation has been in the ability of computers to evolve or train different AI systems. If you look at artificial neural networks, which make up a lot of the AI used in advanced games, you’re fundamentally limited as far as the capabilities of those networks by the computers that train them.
That’s where a quantum computer can help. It can build and train very large artificial neural networks that can recognize speech, recognize intent, develop strategies as an opponent. You’d end up with games that can be much more dynamic, much more interactive on a human level, much smarter. They’d have personality. That’s the kind of experience we haven’t had to date. What could a true artificial intelligence system do to a video game experience?