D-Wave is the original Theranos.<p>- They make bold claims that many people plainly say don't make sense, before seeing any evidence.<p>- They use hype to buy time to do scientific research.<p>- The successes of the D-Wave machine have the same characteristic p-hacking profile of Theranos's Edison machine. That is, try 200 problems, and find 1 that appears to work, which could just be due to chance.<p>- Apologists talk about "there are a lot of smart people working" there or blame "marketing," but who haven't seen the product and don't know any more than anyone else.<p>The main differences are (1) the lack of an enigmatic founder. (2) D-Wave publishes, and then in later analysis their claims don't hold up.
One of D-wave's founders is now trying to patent teleoperation of robots and pass it off as "novel": <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/dwave-founder-new-startup-kindred-ai" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...</a><p>Also, tossing in some machine learning which I presume they're also trying to patent (because it's not as if UC Berkeley and Google have done that 15 times a year since 2010)....<p>All this makes me think they're not legit.
Here's the list of D-Wave supporters (organizations that have spent real $): Google, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Labs, University of Southern California, Temporal Defense Systems, US government, CIA/In-Q-Tel. At over $10M per machine, this adds up to at least $60M. Surely the critics in this blog are missing something.
This is what LANL has to say...<p><a href="http://www.lanl.gov/discover/publications/1663/2016-july/not-magic-quantum.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.lanl.gov/discover/publications/1663/2016-july/not...</a>
Many of the points made why successful organizations invest in new technologies are very weak. Successful organizations got that way by making many more smart decisions than dumb decisions.<p>Occam’s razor suggests that organizations investing in adiabatic quantum computing do so for reasons the participants of this blog don’t have access to.
One thing I'm never quite sure of in these discussions as to what extent D-Wave are a bunch of shysters and to what extent they're actually honest believers that they've built a quantum computer and that their repeated savagings are nothing more than the reasonable expectations of sceptical science being done.<p>Basically do they really believe they've built a quantum computer or do they actually know they haven't and have decided to pretend?
Perhaps better to link to the blog post than the blog index:
<a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3192" rel="nofollow">http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3192</a>
tl;dr Still no evidence that D-Wave's new "thousands of times faster" computer is any faster than a classical computer, even for annealing tasks. And we'll see if we've reached quantum supremacy when/if Google and IBM reveal their 50-qubit quantum computers in the next few years.
This sure sounds like sour grapes to me, arguing that a faster, or true quantum computer will be built in a few years that will out preform Dwave's current system is pretty weak sauce. After reading this article I can't help but see the similarities between this article and the recent attack posts against uber that seem to be the flavor of the day. DWave has built and sold several functioning systems and this is what most likely puts a bullseye on them for people to take cheap shots..just like the Uber haters. Regardless of whether or not DWave has built a true quantum computer, or if the next conventional computer will be faster, they are doing it now, they have found the more effective algorithms and they are pushing the envelope. It's always easier to criticize and whine than stick your neck out and try something new and innovative and articles like this one show that even if you do succeed in those endeavors the haters are going to hate. The one part of the article that I did appreciate is the mention of Geordie Rose who was one of DWave's founders and the fact that an ex wrestler founded such a cutting edge company may speak volumes to the need for strong willed people in unicorn type companies to fend off then nay sayers before they even get off the ground.