In this installment of the Surfing the Singularity blog we go vlog, giving an overview of quantum computing today with application to chemistry. Quantum computing is rapidly advancing, with improvements in machine size, error correction, and scalability. And yet, there's always a desire to drive towards advancements and scientific applications which are just out of reach of today's technologies. New algorithms lead the way.  In this video, will give a brief overview of quantum computing, what it means, where we are on the product roadmaps, and explore an emergent algorithm for pushing the boundaries of chemical modeling beyond what is possible with today's classical machines. Enjoy.  - andy  P.S. Begging your forgiveness for being a YouTube newb... 

As Bill Gates recalls in his recent book-bumping interview with the Wall Street Journal, in the early innocent days of Microsoft he and his co-founder Paul Allen didn't believe in having an office in Washington, D.C.[1] They were soon to learn that was a mistake.[2] Compare and contrast with the scene in the Capital Rotunda last week for the inauguration of the new populist administration - Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, TikTok, and of course Tesla, all represented by their CEOs.[3] Microsoft's market capitalization as of this writing is now greater than the GDP of France.[4] Elon Musk's personal wealth is on par with the GDP of Denmark. Meta's platforms reach an estimated 40% of the world's population.  Apple ad from yesteryear. We're now long past 1984. Consider these other inconvenient truths about global technology: that NVIDIA does not make the GPUs it designs, that most are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, which is about as far away from China ...

Our imaginations, having been so stimulated by the "innovation trigger" of early interactions with ChatGPT and its LLM kin, having experienced the illusion of the algorithm reading your mind, we have now firmly entered into the period of inflated expectations. Any day now we expect a knock on the door to be informed by some HAL Junior that not only are we now out of a job, we've also got 20 minutes to evacuate the premise before its bulldozed to make way for another solar farm and data center. AGI is only just one product announcement away, or maybe two, but certainly three at most...  Nose Deep  There is a strong desire on the part of companies trafficking in AI to generate not just chatbot hallucinations but also customers for real business use cases, meaning revenue, and now. To do that we're going to need hardware, fast, lots of it, and gigajoules to power it. So AWS buys a new data center in PA adjacent to a 2.5GW nuclear power plant.[1] Not to be outdone Microso...

Mustapha Suleyman knows a thing or two about AI.  Originally co-founder of DeepMind, a company and IP eventually acquired by Google, Mr. Suleyman is now CEO of AI at Microsoft. In this latest "Surfing the Singularity" blog installment, we'll review his recent book "The Coming Wave". Hang ten! Go Where You Wanna Go As a game, Go is notorious for its huge array of potential moves, exponentially more complex than chess for example, where computer models beat the best chess player way back in 1997. In 2016, DeepMind's model AlphaGo beat the best Go player in world after being trained the better part of a year with reinforced machine learning on a data set of human Go games and computer-vs-computer play. The following year, DeepMind's AlphaZero exceeded that performance in just a few days of training computation without ever being shown a single Go game, just having been described the rules of the game.[1]    Alas, born at the wrong time. In his Bill Gates-re...

Hello and happy holidays to all. In this blog installment I'll report back from SuperComputing 2024, offer up a programmer-friendly view of the quantum computing space with a code tour of Grover's algorithm, and share some of my own thoughts on using the latest crop of AI programmer assistant tools. (Sadly, not this Grover.) It was a pleasant SC24 high performance computing (HPC) conference in November. Having attended in past either in-person (Atlanta this year) or virtual, this year I chose virtual again. The big loss was being unable to troll the enormous vendor hall, but otherwise, webcasts make it much easier to be in two places at one time or to skim topics of passing interest.[1] There's a new top HPC machine (that we know of) - El Capitan, and its powered by AMD, containing about a million CPU cores and about 10 million GPU cores.[2] Molecular dynamics papers presented using a GPU-accelerated exascale computer reminds that, quantum aside for a moment, the real wor...