AWS Crowdsources Its Quantum Computing Future
Six of the eight largest public cloud providers worldwide–Alibaba, Baidu, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Tencent–have been investing heavily in quantum computing research and development (R&D). AWS, by far the largest cloud provider, had been completely absent from the quantum computing discussion until this week. What happened and why?
The holy grail for cloud providers is to find a hardware solution that accelerates machine learning and artificial intelligence by orders of magnitude. There are two ways to improve machine learning at scale: build specialized architectures using today’s design tools or find a completely different path. Quantum computing is everyone’s big bet for the completely different path.
AWS has invested a lot in machine learning and AI. But innovation in AI is mostly dependent on algorithms and architecture. AI and deep learning acceleration research based on today’s state-of-the-art does not require fundamentally new hardware. It’s mostly a software and solutions architecture story.
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