Congrats to the team, well deserved! I met Chad once at a quantum computing conference in Zurich in 2011, when he was still working for IBM as a researcher. I myself finished my PhD in 2012, leaving academia to work in software. In 2013 I contacted Chad and we had a short Skype call where we talked about quantum computing, since we were both interested in doing something in the space. I don't remember why I didn't follow up on the call, I guess I was busy working on my own ideas and forgot about it. In 2014 I then had the chance to join John Martinis' quantum computing team (which was later acquired by Google), which I declined because I had just won a small grant for starting a startup and wanted to pursue that. After that didn't take off I interviewed again with Rigetti in 2017, but ultimately turned down an offer to join because I still wanted to start something of my own (also their offer didn't seem very attractive to me at the time). So I guess in hindsight those were pretty bad decisions. That said I really cheer for the team, they have built an amazing company and achieved things I wouldn't have thought possible, so I really hope they continue on their path to even bigger success. And for me I hope I'll make better decisions in the future.
You made a set of reasonable decisions that only now seem like you missed out on something. Consider you’d have had to get in early and spend what almost a decade to get to here?
Offers may have had relatively small equity - think 1%. So at most 10 - 15m. If you have better ideas and ability to build a company and execute not unreasonable to do own thing
> Crazy headlines abound: "quantum computing will change life as we know it," "quantum computing will solve global warming," "Quantum computing will revolutionize science and industry," etc etc. These statements are not based on any research or reality at all, they are not even wishful thinking. The number of known quantum algorithms, which promise advantage over classical computation, is just a few (and none of them will "solve global warming" for sure). More importantly, exactly zero such algorithms have been demonstrated in practice so far and the gap between what’s needed to realize them and the currently available hardware is huge, and it's not just a question of numbers. There are qualitative challenges with scaling up, which will likely take decades to resolve (if ever).
Quantum computing may not be all it's cracked up to be , but i 'm ok with some smart people becoming newly minted millionaires by investors with excess wealth.
Unfortunately i don't think you understand how a SPAC works. Retail gets burned, original investors make money through liquidity and so do the executives and whoever brought the SPAC to the market as long as the company doesn't crash and burn before 6 month lock-up.
What you are unintentionally saying is that you don't care if a bunch of smart people just made money off mom and pop (retail) investors if it turns out to be over hyped and doesn't derive value.
You make it sound so bad but maybe it really IS bad. Maybe it's better that these smart people make some money, while moving the field of quantum optics somewhat further, than if some advertisers do.
Only reason I say it is bad is because the insider really know if this is going to perform well or not - SPACs have not traditionally done well and have left mom and pop // retail investors as the bag holders in many cases. I mean you could say what the pied piper of SPACS (Chamath Palihapitiya) said which is "do your own due diligence" but he was highly conflicted when he said that (hyping SPAC deals that have since shed significant value while make money on the initial transactions).
To be fair we still have to see how the SPACs from the last year perform over the next 5 years. My guess is that they went to the public markets when it was rich and retail investment was high though the future is unwritten.
I just wanted to correct your assertion that it was the wealthy that are paying for this, when in fact it is likely just retail investors who will hold the end result (whether good or bad).
> Quantum computing may not be all it's cracked up to be , but i 'm ok with some smart people becoming newly minted millionaires by investors with excess wealth.
Unfortunately, SPACs are mostly a way for those with "excess wealth" (the investor class) to leech off of mom and pops (retail investors).
The sponsors basically get interest free loans to seek out acquisitions of companies that in most cases wouldn't be public markets material and when they consummate a merger, they can walk away with millions upon millions of dollars in fees even if the SPAC performs horribly. When a SPAC performs well, their profits are almost always massively disproportionate to the money they invested and risk they took.
Fortunately in this case, even if quantum computing might not be all it's cracked up to be, Rigetti is a "full-stack" quantum computing company, so it's an amazing opportunity. /s
Hmmm isn’t that fraud? If not legal fraud it sounds ethically very dubious. Edit: I’m specifically referring to the GP comment and not the overall discussion.
I think thee assumption is that the investors have likely stolen from people, through perfectly legal yet ethically dubious means many consider theft but isn't defined in law as theft (deceit, disproportionate reward of effort, etc.). Often the type of theft uses indirection or is difficult to quantify.
You tend not to get investment level rich/wealthy without playing in the ethical grey areas, skirting laws, and/or taking calculated risks of breaking laws to capture more than you actually directly produce.
Not always the case but it tends to be the case from many peoples' world views. As such, it's viewed more as a thief stealing from a thief, where most have little pitty for either thief.
without trying to be extra provocative, but we are A-OK with rich people ripping people off by exploiting their weaknesses, addictions or lack of oversight, so the reverse is not much different.
Capitalism has a place for borderline, gray, unethical-but-legal 'frauds'
This is clearly a strawman, so good job not being “extra provocative”. Please drop the Robin Hood complex and try to have an intellectually honest conversation.
investing in bleeding edge companies will always be risky. Why not let investors take the risk, and may be these engineering challenges will get solved due to monetary motivations!
Because the problem is not the money. Although I think that SPAC represent some sort of arbitrage (otherwise there were not so much of them in the last year). I.e. it does not really matter what the SPAC invest in, as long as it is a good story.
> The number of known quantum algorithms, which promise advantage over classical computation, is just a few
Not at all well versed in the topic, but to me, we are at ENIAC stage of quantum - those few algorithms where quantum has an advantage provide a huge advantage worth a high price tag to those who need them - so this shouldn't be a real worry for some level of viability, technical concerns aside (which are not insignificant, as you point out) - but also as you highlight, 'some level of viability' is not the same as 'instant changes everywhere', so perceptions of hype-vs-reality in the general population is a different question
Anyone considering investing in Regetti should take a look at the company's negative reviews on glassdoor. They paint a picture of a highly disfunctional organization struggling with behind-the-curve tech driven on hubris and the ego of its founder. Some people note the irony of him being married to the famous Uber whistleblower while creating a corporate culture that's comprable to early Uber in many ways.
Rigetti investors are trying to dump this mess onto retail. Be cautious.
Yea I’ve heard horror stories from friends. CEO writing “athletic, no kids, submissive like a ** woman” in his internal job description for an executive assistant.
To be fair, Glassdoor always has negative comments for most companies due to the reporting bias (only disappointed employees take the effort to voice their concerns).
It is a cliche amongst recruiters around the dreaded Glassdoor questions during hiring process.
Since this is HN, I want to point out that they use Common Lisp and are a productive contributor to the CL community with open source. Congratulations!
I think that a lot of physicists who are now in their 40s+ learned and used Lisp in university, and have simply found ways to keep using it since then.
For new hires, the fact is, a quantum computing codebase is daunting to learn regardless of the language. Therefore, apprenticing someone on a new language at the same time as everything else they are learning is not really the same relative burden that it would be if, say, the application was a plain boring database CRUD app in an unfamiliar language.
We definitely make excellent use of macros and DSLs and the REPL in many ways. I wish I could talk about it more, but alas.
Rigetti is a completely vertically integrated company, from design to manufacturing (Fab-1)[1] to cloud access (Rigetti's own QCS [2] as well as AWS Bracket[3]). They have their own Fab which is extremely advantageous and I cloud be wrong but neither Google, IBM or anyone has that capability in-house. I guess, it is not fair to draw comparisons to other semiconductor companies like Intel or TSMC since the scale is off by a factor of 10,000x, nonetheless, having your own Fab creates opportunities for process engineering that would otherwise be too slow. I think the holy grail of quantum computing is how best to architect, design and manufacture quantum chips with low noise, everything else is sort of secondary. Cloud access is a solved problem.
That sounds reasonable. On the other hand, if a quantum computer dropped out of the sky tomorrow, virtually no one would know what to do with it. So there is plenty of infrastructure, tooling and know-how that needs to be produced in that 10+ year timeframe. And there will likely be huge demand for all of these things as big co's scramble to get on the bandwagon.
I agree, although IMO its not clear Rigetti is poised to capture and realise the value of quantum tooling. In anycase its a company worth keeping an eye on, but I suspect they are closer to IBM Watson than Bell Laboratories.
Can something meaningful come out of it in 10-20 years though? Or is it all vaporware? Could still be a good reason to buy, as long as what they're doing is serious.
Has anyone done any real due diligence on the company within the community? Do they have a really exciting path forward and serious traction at this point to warrant their price in the market?
I never trust the SPAC route - less rigorous detail and typically overhyped prospects. Would like to be corrected though.
Aside from the obvious problems with SPACs, I wonder if they wind up having more of a chilling effect on the overall tech spaces than not.
A lot of nascent technologies run in cycles - quantum, ai, synbio, vr all have had hype cycles in which a lot of money floods the field and a lot of progress can be made, even if the underlying technology isn't ready for the mass market yet. At some point it becomes clear there's no market yet, and the investors flee, and we have to wait for another cycle.
The SPAC seems like an obvious way for one company to make a boatload of cash - Rigetti stands to take in a few hundred million, which is a hell of a fundraising round, and bully for them, but it also means the market's taking a closer look at them an awful lot sooner than they would otherwise, because there's no way they'd be going public via the traditional method at this point. I can't see that being good for fundraising elsewhere in the quantum sector overall right now, and I wonder if it presages an earlier retreat from the sector than would otherwise have happened.
I’ve heard of culture problems from a few folks and similar comments are here today. My friend who works in Quantum Computing says the joke is “I regretti joining this company”
"Full-stack" is not an official term, but it is a reasonable way to refer to "working on both creating the low level hardware (e.g. transmons), the intermediate layer (error correction that makes the many physical qubits into a few reliable logical qubits), and the higher levels of algorithms for useful applications".
There is no "scalable" quantum computer in existence yet. If we can make a million qubits of quality 10x better than the ones we have now, then we will definitely be able to talk about scaling and useful applications. Today we have machines with 10s to 100s of qubits that are extremely exciting technology demonstrators, but too small and too noisy to fulfill any of the promises of quantum computing from the 90s and 00s.
No worries on the typo, and sorry if I said something dumb :) - I know I have something to learn here. I'm a layperson whose knowledge is basically the first chapter of an introductory undergrad text (although when I have time, I will dig into more). Perhaps I didn't get the terminology right, but I was thinking in terms of their total addressable market, depending on the quantity and quality of the qubits, they wont' be able to hand the keys to the castle of public key cryptography (so Shor's algorithm) to just anyone. Maybe that's baked into their business plan. Then I thought of some ways one might still probably get a bit done in this respect with a smaller number of qubits if SAT is in BQP (very half-baked idea), but from what I googled, it sounds like that's an open question.
I can not know for sure, but I doubt that this worry is on their mind. By the time these machines are reliable enough to do prime factorization, we would have had plenty of opportunities to move to "post quantum" public cryptography schemes that are as resilient to quantum attacks as they are to classical (cloudflare and google chrome have already implemented experimental HTTPS variants that are resilient). I doubt that Shor's algorithm would ever be a "killer app", because only a small fraction of encryption algorithms are susceptible to such an attack (it is not too far fetched to say that it is just a historical happenstance that our standard public encryption schemes happen to be susceptible).
> Anyone familiar with the term? Haven't heard it before.
Full-stack probably means they deal with all areas of QC, from theoretical research to hardware implementation.
> I thought quantum computing was still in the research phase? What's there to scale?
IMO it is still largely in the research phase, but actual quantum computers do exist. The thing to scale would be the number of physical and logical (error-corrected) qubits. Quantum error correction is difficult though, and will take a lot of work to get scalable QCs with error correction. With some of the current schemes being pursued today, the number of physical qubits per logical qubit is quite high (e.g. 17 physical per one logical in Surface-17).
Interesting random fact: The Uber whistleblower who wrote about the sexual harassment at the company is married to the CEO of Rigetti. Tech is a small world.
> [...] a fully committed PIPE in excess of $100 million, direct investment, and $345 million of cash held in the trust account of Supernova II, assuming no redemptions.
This is an odd assumption - the median redemption rate is 73%[1]. So the total new cash into the company will likely be less than half of the quoted $458mm.
What technology isn't overhyped and under delivered? It's pretty difficult to get anyone remotely interested in technology unless they think it's going to be revolutionary and/or make them rich.
I used to push back against the ridiculous overselling but I instead decided to join the club. If you tackle impossible problems and fail, people understand unlike when you tackle incredibly difficult problems people think are simple and you fail. In addition, you sound like a visionary and have a great story: people eat this up. Rarely ever is anyone concerned with practicality until it comes to actually paying for vision. Suddenly when people start paying for the vision, they find themselves wondering why they didn't ask all the practicality questions. You handwave the infeasibility away as pioneering discovery, then rinse and repeat until someone becomes grounded in the reality of what's possible with technology.
After that you move on to the next person with visions of granduer. Either the pool of naive clients will eventually grow intelligent of the charade in the tech industry and suddenly become interested in pursuing difficult yet realistic goals or wel'll just continue this dance where the investors and clients shared memory never reaches this stage and continue to pedal over-fanciful promises.
People don't like to hear about the problems of reality, they only want to hear about the potential promise of technology and/or how rich it might make them. Quantum computing is an interesting field and by no means am I saying it isn't a worthwhile grounded pursuit, I'm merely stating that the ridiculous oversell is the norm in all tech and yes, quantum computing is running neck and neck in the hype cycle with AI. Don't fight the hype cycles, identify and ride them otherwise you might drown from the wave of industry momentum.
Or a 0.15% probability of becoming 10x bigger. For things like this, essentially all the expected value is in the very long tail. I won't be buying shares any time soon, but more power to those who do.
Having a device with 1000 transmons does not seem too crazy to me. But I would be deeply impressed if the quality of these 1000 transmons is not lower than the quality of the current 80. And keep in mind that either way these will be "physical" qubits, not error protected logical qubits. It takes hundreds or thousands of noisy physical qubits to make reliable logical qubits (with error correcting codes).
IBM has a similar timeline in its roadmap, going from 65 qubits in 2020 to 1,121 qubits in 2023. From their blog [1], it seems like scaling beyond 1,000 will be the real challenge.
