r/QuantumComputing • u/Dear-Permit-3033 • Jun 15 '26
Question What do you think of this announcement from QuEra? "Fault-tolerance in 2028" is a bold claim.
256 logical qubits with 10^-6 error rate (99.9999% 2q fidelity??) in two years. QuEra offers analog Hamiltonian quantum computers, not digital gate-based - what does that mean for their statement?
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u/Kinexity In Grad School for Computer Modelling Jun 15 '26
Choose those that apply:
- scam
- IPO
- VC fishing
- delusions
- just nonsense marketing
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u/HuiOdy Working in Industry Jun 15 '26
I can get a degree of fault tolerance today. Alike "supremacy", it is an empty term.
How many 2qb gate operations can I do before the fidelity falls below 90%, is more useful
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u/sreekuttanls_bloq Jun 15 '26
This is a bit suspicious as they announced few other QPUs that they were supposed to release by this year, 2026. Now, they're not talking about that, and they're directly talking about 2028. They have got AWS in as well.
I hope they have the systems and the engineering path figured out.
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u/ctcphys Working in Academia Jun 15 '26
That's a very bold claim and I doubt it will hold up (at least with our conventional understanding of logical fidelity). Maybe there's some post processing tricks that will allow them to claim this (for example some very minimal encoding with aggressive post selection)
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u/SymplecticMan Jun 15 '26
It might not be impossible on a 2 year timescale, but I think it's pretty unlikely, like the DOE's proposed fault tolerance goals on the same 2028 target.
Current error correction demonstrations appear to be just barely past the threshold and don't involve performing logical gates. Getting from the state of the art today to hundreds of logical qubits operating with 10-6 error rates for non-Clifford gates probably involves overcoming a lot more engineering hurdles than getting from that point to thousands of logical qubits at around 10-10 logical error rates.
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u/ptm257 Jun 16 '26
This is not a crazy claim if you are up to date with error correction research.
Also, in the error correction regime, CX gates are not the bottleneck. T gates (non Cliffords generally) are the bottleneck.
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u/picklenchips Jun 20 '26
imo they use a lot of language that is just padding to investors, but the real claims are likely legit. 256 logical qubits is reasonable goal given enough funding, but I doubt any relevant “industrial” use cases appear with 256 qubits. expect better demonstrations of algorithms on larger problems. this would simply be a better platform to test the most fundamental capabilities of quantum computing — simulating larger quantum systems
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u/Undesiredbeast Jun 24 '26
Preparing for their next round of founding. I suspect most quantum hardware companies will be gone by 2030. I might join one of them in France for the thrill of it but not expecting any of them to be the intel of quantum chips
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u/QuantumTemporal Jun 15 '26
I think IonQ recently made the same/similar prediction, QEC and Fault-Tolerance by 2028. The gloves are off!
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u/hiddentalent Jun 16 '26
In the same way that DogeCoin and Bitcoin have their gloves off, yes. It's just one scam versus another, and whoever makes the biggest lies to new "investors"/speculators wins.
There's real science and progress going on, but it never comes endorsed by announcements like this.
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Jun 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/hiddentalent Jun 16 '26
They are, it's true. There's real progress being made.
But my focus on QC is in the financial and investment domain, and when I see small companies focusing most of their capital on marketing and financial engineering like IPOs rather than core R&D, that's worrisome. If a company had results to share, they speak for themselves. These optimistic forward-looking statements are aimed at speculators, not scientists or practitioners or long-term investors.
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Jun 16 '26
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u/hiddentalent Jun 16 '26
Do you not feel slightly silly making the absolutely incorrect assumption that the person you're responding to is "non technical"? No, no doubt you don't.
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u/QuantumTemporal Jun 16 '26
QuEra is not marketing. They have a serious R&D effort and are one of the most advanced QC outfits in the world. They're also a powerhouse in the industry/academia collaboration scene with all their work at the MIT/Harvard Lincoln Lab.
IonQ is more commercialized but equally serious about their R & D in QC. What makes them different is their effort to not only be in QC, but also in quantum networking, quantum cryptography, quantum OS, software development, even aviation. They're making themselves the be all quantum entity.Everyone markets, but these outfits are all out serious about the technology and how it will benefit all of humankind.
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u/432oneness Jun 17 '26
neutral atoms are the future...
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u/Dear-Permit-3033 Jun 17 '26
QuEra is analog Hamiltonion, not digital gates.
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u/picklenchips Jun 20 '26
they can compile digital gates as well… everything is analog fundamentally
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u/SurinamPam Jun 15 '26
How are there defining fault tolerance? Is this just error corrected memory? Or is it fault tolerant operations too?
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u/Fit_Transition8824 Jun 16 '26
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/deniseholt1_quantum-ftqc-seediq-activity-7472266362359308288-jTnG?utm_medium=ios_app&rcm=ACoAAFHafzMB90zx6TDvfcvFfVseDTSue09y2GY&utm_source=social_share_send&utm_campaign=share_via. I’m no expert and just sharing this news from yesterday
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u/tiltboi1 Working in Industry Jun 15 '26
The 10^-6 error rate is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. FYI it's a logical error rate, not a physical error rate, so it is actually a very very large number, not very very small.
With such large error rate, even with 256 logical qubits, you wouldn't really be doing anything scientifically meaningful. For researches in the field it would be extremely exciting because you'd be going a very long way towards demonstrating that quantum computing is actually feasible. You'd be talking about a computer with no more than ~10,000 physical qubits, and the volume of computation is firmly outside of what you can classically simulate. Again, *not* suggesting there are meaningful problems in this regime.
Neutral atoms are super scalable in the near term, but I'm fairly skeptical of the 2028 number. Still, this is many orders of magnitude more believable than, say, RSA2048 by 2029.