Multiverse Computing and Mila just announced a partnership designed advance artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) using quantum computing and quantum-inspired methods. The partnership will also focus on developing new leaders in the high-tech fields of quantum computing and ML. Mila represents a global hub of scientific advancement in Montreal with approximately 1000 researchers specializing in AI and ML. While Mila researchers and students gain access to Multiverse quantum-inspired ML technology used by its customers in mobility, energy, life sciences and industry 4.0 segments, Multiverse will tap into the tensor networks and machine learning expertise at Mila. Tensor networks use models based on quantum physics and increase the speed and precision of training ML models.

This piece provides an overview of the current status of quantum computing for those just starting to look at the field. For those interested in learning more, we recommend viewing the video of a recent panel session from the recent HPE Discover 2022 event in Las Vegas, Nevada. Besides myself, other members of the panel included Kirk Bresniker, HPE Fellow, VP and Chief Architect, Hewlett Packard Labs, Yehuda Naveh, co-founder and CTO of Classiq, and Dr. Shini Somara, moderator and TV technology journalist. So, is quantum computing ready to take off and disrupt industries as we know them? As an analyst and publisher about all things quantum, I hear variations of this question every day. My response is to fall back on the decades-old "Amara's Law," which states that: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."

There is a laboratory deep within University College London (UCL) that looks like a cross between a rebel base in Star Wars and a scene imagined by Jules Verne. Hidden within the miles of cables, blinking electronic equipment and screens is a gold-coloured contraption known as a dilution refrigerator. Its job is to chill the highly sensitive equipment needed to build a quantum computer to close to absolute zero, the coldest temperature in the known universe. Standing around the refrigerator are students from Germany, Spain and China, who are studying to become members of an elite profession that has never existed before: quantum engineering. These scientists take the developments in quantum mechanics over the past century and turn them into revolutionary real-world applications in, for example, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles, cryptography and medicine.