What I would really love to see are some of these computing models brought back to life. Alan Kay's idea of computing looks very interesting albeit very scattered; Exokernels is another interesting thought, which could lead up to very interesting distributed computing model (like an irc, but c stands for computing); Transactional Memory is another. There are a lot of them, and I think they are best served by an organisation in lieu with Bell Labs or Xerox Research..
I've had a period where I was deeply interested in reading and listening to any of his ideas and talks, but I've never spent any time with the information, other than just consuming some of his ideas.
I have some vague ideas about what his ideas are, and where he thinks we're still lagging behind, but I have no idea what "Alan Kay's idea of computing" is supposed to be.
Unless, are you talking about his idea of objects as the smallest abstraction of computers, giving each object something akin to an ip-address; where programming happens by wiring together these objects?
This company has built the easy part first (the web app and database), and now just needs to do the the insanely hard problem at the core of their business which nobody knows is possible to solve.
I would probably not invest, is what I'm saying.
Having a quantum integrated circuit without a way to access it (a cloud platform, in Rigetti’s case), is like having a CPU without a motherboard. How might you expect to program the integrated circuit if it has no infrastructure to allow it to be programmed? This is a key ingredient to quantum advantage, not just the hard science of manufacturing scalable and fault-tolerant integrated circuits, especially since the notion of programming such a circuit is already a woefully nascent field.
I went to a presentation by Gwen at SciPy2018 and got to talk to her a little later. They're doing some really cool things with this stuff. I think they're also trying to just get people more used to quantum programming in general. If you haven't looked up their PyQuil language yet, it's definitely worth checking out. https://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
I'd say he's confusing step 20 with step 2 or something...
This reminds me of the carbon nanotube hype, when they we're going to be the best at everything from batteries to bulletproof vests. There are currently 0 CN products on the market, and it is not clear there ever will be.
Betting on an undiscovered technology that isn't proven to exist is far form a sure thing.
And the higher-qubit demos you've heard about have quite low fidelity, meaning they'll need multiple physical qubits to represent each logical qubit.
When a problem scales like 2^(2x), you can easily reach an insurmountable barrier. I'm not saying they will, mind you.
Edit: Thanks everyone for pointing out a flaw in my opinion. For anyone actually interested in delving into the discussion of whether or not quantum computing is faster than classical computing https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/24943/is-there-...
