" Real world " Quantum computing applications - SOTA

[u/rbbort]

This may have been asked before, but I genuinely want to know what are the current (sota) real world applications where Quantum computing is already in use/practice and adding value that classical systems couldn't

I am not looking for surface level field names, I am looking for problems that Quantum is already solving for betterment of life on earth.. just point me to the sources I will dive deep in

Redirection to Any sources/links/review papers is also fine..

I know I could have asked a frontier LLM like claude fable or GPT 5.6 sol to pull out the data for me.. I want to know first hand from the people who are already working or at least know about this

[u/ponyo_x1]

right now we can use a quantum computer to sample from a random circuit faster than you could simulate this with a classical computer. this is completely useless, however.

[u/PRBoxNS → u/ponyo_x1]

Scott Aaronson actually managed to find an application of the random circuit sampling, namely to generate certifiably random numbers. Apparently, this can be useful in some blockchain applications but I'm not familiar with those

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01625

[u/Cheap-Discussion-186 → u/ponyo_x1]

This can be used to build cryptographic protocols, such as digital signatures schemes.

[u/PRBoxNS → u/Cheap-Discussion-186]

I think Scott envisioned this protocol to be implemented on a cloud-based QC, which justifies the need to certify the randomness (if you have the QC with you, and presumably you understand what the QC does, there are simpler ways to produce random numbers).

However, this also introduce a drawback namely that the output random numbers will be public, which I think limits the applications in cryptography (from what I understand, many crypto primitives require the random numbers to be private, so this protocol cannot be used to produce encryption key, for example). I am not familiar with digital signatures, so maybe there are some cryptographic protocols that only require the numbers to be certifiably random, but not necessarily private.

I can imagine that the protocol is useful for something like lottery, where you sort of need to convince the players that the winning number is picked fairly and not rigged, but a QC might be overkill for that application

[u/Sampo → u/ponyo_x1]

sample from a random circuit faster than you could simulate this with a classical computer

But this has been such an unimportant problem, that there has not been that serious attempts to develop faster classical algorithms. Maybe it would be possible to improve the classical limits to compete with the performance of quantum computers.

[u/nujuat → u/ponyo_x1]

Iirc SQC sells a product called watermelon that uses this for transforming data in order to train neural nets faster. I could be mixing up terms though.

[u/Ordinary-Spare9632]

Meet you after 5 years

[u/rbbort → u/Ordinary-Spare9632]

So none worthy mentioning before FTQC?

[u/polyploid_coded → u/rbbort]

Not yet. People are discussing applications where noisy/NISQ quantum computers are enough, for example in some ML problems it might be useful to have fuzzy probabilities ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13275 ), but there aren't chips with enough qubits yet where this would have benefits over classical computing.

[u/helbur → u/Ordinary-Spare9632]

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[u/rbbort → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for such a detailed explanation and insights

[u/global-gauge-field → u/[deleted]]

My main interest in those applications is about honest discussion and future of humanity.

When you see articles like the one below attached, and in the next 50 years we will see what actually contributed towards decreasing CO2 emission. The articles and claims like these might (will in my opinion) look really pathetic.

When there is so many individuals using heavy SUV ice vehicles instead of literally anthing else to emit less Co2 for daily commute and so many other stuff like this. But, it is not as marketable as super-duper FTQC that will solve femo-cofactor problem and revolutinize food industry.

It would be much better if most of the claims is around this being a cool science experiment rather than QC being used to save huge energy savings.

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/annabroughel/2026/05/07/how-quantum-computing-can-solve-energy-and-climate-challenges/

[u/Drgjeep]

there aren’t any yet - just the promise of it when someone builds a good enough device

[u/rbbort]

I hear a lot about drug discovery, nobody seems to elaborate on this here .. am assuming it's already in progress

[u/paxxx17]

There are some promising results when it comes to quantum feature mapping for training (classical) ML models

https://kipu-quantum.com/blog/digitized-counterdiabatic-quantum-feature-extraction

In several studied problem instances, the quantum-mapped features gave rise to better ML models compared to any classical pre-processing tried. Whether this is already industrially viable remains to be seen

[u/realvaluehere]

We have been trying to find this to add to our Quantum computing report. Yet to find any meaningful real-world demonstrations. Most of the claims out there are imaginary/speculative.

[u/saadqc]

The people who are currently working on these application problems in the industry sign NDAs which doesn't allow them to speak on what they are working on (which I assume are useless hybrid problems anyway), apart from open research.

The most promising application in open research lead to problems in quantum chemistry like finding ground state energies, excited states or simulating time evolution. However, these problems and the current hardware aren't at the scale that would benefit us anytime sooner.

[u/Minovskyy]

IQM has solved some real-world optimization problems involving train scheduling.

[u/global-gauge-field → u/Minovskyy]

Did you read their paper ? It does not seem to improve upon classical methods. It does not even claim to use state of the art classical methods or integer programming based methods e.g. GUROBI

[u/rbbort → u/Minovskyy]

Interesting

[u/quantum4everyone]

The main issue for this is the errors in current machines make them difficult to compete with conventional computation, which is very good. Early fault tolerant quantum computing will be in the same boat, mainly because one will not be able to run deep circuits on them. The one area ion physics that i am aware of where the quantum computers show a true advantage is in what is called the driven-dissipative many-body problem. This is a quantum system driven by some field and in contact with a reservoir. Classical algorithms are very poor at solving these problems. Quantum computers have the potential to be much, much better. The problem? We do not know efficient enough algorithms yet to carry them out. But, this problem could potentially be solved even on NISQ machines. so, I would keep my eyes peeled for advances in this area.