The first “commercially useful” quantum computers will be available within the next five to seven years. Amazon‘s top artificial intelligence executive told CNBC on Wednesday.
A few months into his role leading Amazon’s new organization focused on AI models, chips and quantum computing, Peter DeSantis said the technology will grow in line with advances in semiconductor capabilities.
“I believe that within the next five to seven years we will see the first commercially useful small-scale quantum computers,” DeSantis told CNBC.
“From there, you’ll start to see something a lot like Moore’s Law, where they get bigger and bigger every year and can tackle more and more interesting problems,” he added.
Moore’s Law is the idea that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every two years, leading to the development of more powerful semiconductors over time.
DeSantis’ comments are the first timeline predictions Amazon has provided for useful quantum computing.
Proponents of quantum computing argue that the technology can solve problems that modern computers cannot solve.
In classical computing, information is stored in bits. Each bit is either 1 or 0. Quantum computing uses zero, one, or qubits or qubits in between.
“One of the misnomers is that quantum computers are going to be faster computers, but that’s simply not the case. Quantum computers solve very specific kinds of problems that classical computers don’t solve well today, and quantum computers will solve them much better,” DeSantis said.
Quantum computing is an area of increasing competition from technology giants such as: microsoft, google and IBM Like many other startups, it is developing its technology.
Last year, Amazon announced Ocelot, a quantum computing chip designed to tackle the problem of error correction, a key challenge in the quantum field.
DeSantis’ timeline falls somewhere in between various other timeline predictions for useful quantum computing. Last March, Google’s quantum technology executive told CNBC that it was only five years before the technology could run practical applications that modern computers cannot compute.
Microsoft believes it can have a commercially viable quantum machine by 2029.
On the other side of the spectrum, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang rocked quantum stocks last year by saying he was “probably 15 years away” from developing a practical quantum computer. Mr. Huang later retracted that comment.
“The first problems I think we’re going to tackle are quantum-based problems like chemistry and materials science,” DeSantis said Wednesday.
“These problems mean that we currently cannot run simulations with sufficient fidelity on classical computers, but once we have quantum computers we will see real progress,” he said.
CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this article.
