At its Quantum Summit 2023, IBM took the stage with an interesting spirit: one of almost awe at having things go their way. But the quantum of today – the one that’s changing IBM’s roadmap so deeply on the back of breakthrough upon breakthrough – was hard enough to consolidate. As IBM sees it, the future of quantum computing will hardly be more permissive. IBM announced cutting-edge devices at the event, including the 133-qubit Heron Quantum Processing Unit (QPU), which is the company's first utility-scale quantum processor, and the self-contained Quantum System Two, a quantum-specific supercomputing architecture. And further improvements to the cutting-edge devices are ultimately required.
Each breakthrough that afterward becomes obsolete is another accelerating bump against what we might call quantum's "plateau of understanding." We’ve already crested this plateau with semiconductors, so much so that the latest CPUs and GPUs are reaching practical, fundamental design limits where quantum effects start ruining our math. Conquering the plateau means that utility and understanding are now enough for research and development to be somewhat self-sustainable – at least for a Moore’s-law-esque while.
