Aaronson Starts a Venture Investing Fund

Dr. Quantum Supremacy is tired of watching his friends and associates get rich with half-baked ideas about bitcoin, quantum computing, and AI, so he is joing the gold rush. He announces:

So then, screw it! In partnership with my brother David Aaronson, who’s long done investing professionally, and on David’s guidance and encouragement, I’m hereby embarking on a new policy. ...

So far, David and I are investing in:

• Oratomic (the new neutral-atom quantum computing startup out of Pasadena started by Dolev Bluvstein, John Preskill, and Hsin-Yuan Huang among others, which I previously blogged about here). See here for their Series A announcement this week. ...

So let me educate you then. I played a central role in introducing the whole program of sampling-based quantum supremacy back in 2009-2012. That what was allowed first Google, then Quantinuum and others, to do such dramatic demonstrations starting in 2019. Almost anyone in quantum computing will tell you that that was essential to various QC startups being able to go public recently at ~$15B valuations.

Now, what’s true is that I didn’t succeed at capturing essentially any of the value that I helped create this way. What’s true is that all the billions of dollars went to other people, who optimized for getting equity early on, rather than to me or my students, who optimized for learning the truth about quantum speedups and writing the key papers that other people then managed to profit from.

This is another sign we are in a bubble.

Oratomic says that it will not try to demonstrate quantum supremacy. It will go straight for a commercial quantum computer.