To make practical optical quantum computers.
The earliest human calculation tools found so far are three 40,000-year-old femurs with scales found in South Africa. And over time, so have the tools of human calculations.
The concept of a quantum computer was proposed 43 years ago, but it was only in the last decade that it became a reality in the world's most advanced laboratories. At first glance, it may sound unclear, but there are already a group of outstanding talents who have become "the first people to eat crabs" in the practical application of quantum computing.
In the era of big data, due to the exponential growth of global data volume (doubling every two years), the current computing power is facing two major challenges: first, the growth of computing power in the world cannot meet the growth of demand for big data analysis and AI large model training; The second is that Moore's Law is gradually approaching its limit. In the future, the demand for computing power in countries around the world will grow explosively. In order to meet these challenges, quantum computing, as a revolutionary technology for future productivity, has entered the public eye and has become an area of great concern to all parties such as politics, academia and investment.
In the report of the two sessions in 2024, it is proposed to "formulate a future industrial development plan, open up new tracks such as quantum technology and life sciences, and create a number of future industry pilot areas".
Founded in November 2020, Bose Quantum is a start-up under this wave that focuses on combining quantum computing with artificial intelligence (AI) and developing its own optical quantum computer that can be put into practical use. Since its establishment, Bose Quantum has won a number of milestone honors, such as the self-developed and released 100 computational qubits and 550 computational qubits of coherent optical quantum computer - "Tiangong Quantum Brain" real machine, the only hard technology company in Beijing to develop optical quantum computing, won the honorary title of "Digital Economy Innovation Leading Achievement", and won the "Most Disruptive Technology Award......
Coherent optical quantum computer with 550 computing qubits - "Tiangong Quantum Brain 550W"
Quantum computing is known as one of the "most challenging" technologies, but such a "hard bone" has been gnawed by Bose Quantum. After nearly four years of development, Bose Quantum has become a leading enterprise in the field of quantum computing in China. Its excellent ability has also attracted the favor of a number of capitals, including China Mobile Capital, China Holding Fund, Yuanhe Capital and other star teams.
Dr. Wen Kai, founder & CEO of Bose Quantum, told Rongzhong Finance in an interview that Bose Quantum will continue to climb the world's highest peak of quantum computing technology in the future. Under such bold ambitions, the future Bose quantum is very exciting.
A returnee doctor's "dream of serving the country with technology"
In an interview with Dr. Wen Kai, the words he mentioned the most were commercialization and practical application.
As we all know, the more high-end technology is, the more likely it is to face the problem of difficult implementation. However, Dr. Wen Kai revealed that Bose Quantum is the first quantum computing company in China to achieve commercialization, so practical implementation is still their advantage.
And this is also in line with Dr. Wen Kai's original intention of entrepreneurship back then: to do practical quantum computing, let quantum computing out of the laboratory, and empower various industries.
Recalling the entrepreneurial path he once had, Dr. Wen Kai said that he was exposed to quantum computing when he was an undergraduate at Tsinghua University, and always believed that quantum computing could be combined with AI. After graduating with a master's degree in physics from Tsinghua University, Kai Wen entered Stanford University to pursue a Ph.D. in quantum computing. During his Ph.D., he proposed a new scheme for using coherent lasers to complete quantum computing, and became the first Ph.D. in this field.
With the end of the traditional Moore's Law, AI and big data have put forward higher requirements for computing power, and the development of quantum computing has ushered in great opportunities. At the same time, the international situation of the mainland chip industry is becoming more and more serious, and it has become more and more difficult to develop classic supercomputers in China, and quantum computing provides a new opportunity.
With the simple idea of "serving the country with technology", Wenkai decided to return to China to look for development opportunities for quantum computing in China, so that quantum computing can truly be combined with the industry.
During the preparation of the team and the recruitment of talents, Dr. Wen Kai visited well-known scholars and experts in the field of quantum computing around the world, and actively cooperated with Beijing Institute of Quantum Information Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University and other institutes to form a star technical team from Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Stanford University and other top universities. After the team was formed, Bose Quantum was officially established.
As the founder and academic leader, Dr. Wen Kai has led the company to achieve a series of milestones in exploration. For example, Bose Quantum and Putian Electronic City Incubator jointly built the first high-level quantum experiment center demonstration platform laboratory in Chaoyang District, and successively obtained the certification of "Zhongguancun High-tech Enterprise" and "National High-tech Enterprise", and established the "Bose Quantum Science and Technology Association". Subsequently, Bose Quantum was also recognized as a specialized, special and new small and medium-sized enterprise in Beijing in 2023, and was approved to set up a postdoctoral research workstation to help more scientific and technological workers devote themselves to China's own quantum computing cause.
In terms of self-developed products, Bose Quantum's core products include self-developed coherent optical quantum computer real machines, "Kaiwu SDK" development kits, and self-developed algorithms covering various industries.
Among them, the latest 550 computing qubit coherent optical quantum computer released in April 2024 - "Tiangong Quantum Brain 550W" has been qualitatively upgraded compared with "Tiangong Quantum Brain 100".
In terms of computing power advantages, "Tiangong Quantum Brain 550W" can solve mathematical problems with up to more than 550 variables, and the coupling link scale reaches 150975, which is 28 times that of "Tiangong Quantum Brain 100". With the increase of the scale of the problem, the actual computational complexity also increases exponentially, and the "Tiangong Quantum Brain 550W" realizes the coherent optical quantum computing solution of the 550-node fully connected and programmable Max-Cut problem for the first time in China, which can perform parallel search in the huge solution space in several milliseconds to find the optimal solution, and achieve tens of thousands of times faster than the classical computing in practical application problems! The probability of obtaining the optimal solution is 99%! Dr. Wen Kai revealed that the "Tiangong Quantum Brain 550W" has outstanding performance advantages in all aspects and has reached the international leading level.
Nowadays, "Tiangong Quantum Brain 550W" has carried out scenario verification and application exploration for AI, communications, finance, transportation, medicine, mobile cloud, electric power and other fields, and has taken the lead in realizing dozens of industrialization achievements in the field of quantum technology.
Dr. Wen Kai also told reporters that in the future, Bose Quantum will continue to attract top talents, continue to deepen the innovation and breakthrough of quantum computing technology, continuously promote the ecological construction of the quantum computing industry chain, and strive to achieve the wide implementation of practical quantum technology, and make greater contributions to the progress and development of human society.
The combination of quantum computing and AI
It is worth mentioning that before the establishment of Bose Quantum, there have been many giant enterprises in the world to deploy in the field of quantum computing. However, Bose Quantum did not choose a general quantum computing architecture based on superconductivity like Google, IBM, Intel and other giants, but chose the path of optical quantum.
Dr. Wen Kai told reporters that optical quantum computing, as the name suggests, is a technology that uses the quantum characteristics of light to calculate, and it is also a mainstream quantum computing technology. Compared with other technical routes, optical quantum computing does not require ultra-low temperature, and has many advantages such as large number of qubits, stable operation at room temperature, and long coherence time, which can be engineered in the short term, and is an emerging form of commercial quantum computers.
He believes that optical quantum is one of the best ways to achieve large-scale quantum computing, and at the same time, optical quantum can better meet the market demand in fields with huge computing power consumption such as AI.
In fact, after a year-long business practice of practical application of quantum computing at Bose Quantum, the team discovered the huge computing advantages that quantum computing can play in AI scenarios. This also reinforces the company's goal of focusing on combining quantum computing with AI.
"Quantum computing is more like a "potential changer" in the AI industry, and although quantum computing is still in the early stages of development, its future application prospects in the field of AI are widely promising. Dr. Wen Kai explained the relationship between the two.
Dr. Wen further cited the potential enormous advantages of quantum computing in processing large amounts of data and performing complex calculations, which can accelerate the training process of certain types of machine learning algorithms, such as vector machines (SVMs) and neural networks. The Grover algorithm of quantum computing can perform fast searches in unsorted databases, which is of great significance for improving the search efficiency and information retrieval ability of AI systems. Quantum computing can process highly complex and high-dimensional data sets, which can help improve the decision-making ability and prediction accuracy of AI systems.
In the field of "quantum computing + AI", the research group of Professor Li Shengbo of the School of Vehicles and Vehicles of Tsinghua University has previously proposed the Ising training algorithm for multi-layer neural networks, which is the first deep learning training algorithm for coherent Ising machine (CIM) in the world, representing an important breakthrough in the field of quantum training of neural networks. Experiments show that it can solve large-scale binary optimization problems within milliseconds, providing another possible path for model training in the AI era. This is also one of the key pillars for the development of breakthrough practical quantum computing in the era of quantum AI.
For the next step of "quantum computing + AI", Dr. Wen Kai revealed that based on Bose Quantum's excellent computing power advantages in the field of optical quantum computing, the company has signed a contract with Tsinghua University to reach in-depth cooperation, and the two sides will continue to reach in-depth cooperation and exchanges in the field of "quantum computing + AI" in terms of joint research and development, achievement transformation, talent training, etc., and implement the cross-integration and application exploration of "production, education, research and application", and strive to achieve greater pioneering breakthroughs.
In addition, Bose Quantum's applications in other fields of quantum information technology are also bearing fruit.
Taking finance as an example, Bose Quantum and Huaxia Bank's breakthrough achievement in the field of finance, "Realizing Quantum Advantage for the First Time in the Financial Field: Quantum Computing Speed of Portfolio Optimization Scheme Surpasses Classical Computing", was successfully selected as one of the "10 Major Events of Financial Informatization in 2023" released by the journal "Financial Electronics", which is in charge of the People's Bank of China, which fully demonstrates that the depth and breadth of this achievement are leading in the industry and have extensive industry influence.
In the field of logistics, after testing, Bose Quantum's self-developed 100 computational qubit coherent optical quantum computer can save an average of 92% of computing time compared with traditional computing methods. Obviously, the application of quantum computing in AGV (automated guided vehicle) scheduling not only demonstrates the great potential of coherent optical quantum computers, but also points out the direction for the future development of logistics automation, which has great practical application prospects and milestone breakthrough significance.
Down to earth
Climb the heights of quantum technology
Quantum computing is currently a very fierce track of global technology competition, and many countries and technology giants are actively deploying and developing the quantum computing industry. At present, the whole track is showing a development trend of a hundred flowers.
According to a 2022 study published by the Boston Consulting Group, it is estimated that quantum computing could create $450 billion to $850 billion in value over the next 15 to 30 years. This shows that the potential value of the quantum computing market is very large, and with the development and application of technology, this market size is expected to grow significantly.
Although quantum computing in the mainland is developing rapidly and has achieved remarkable results, there is still a certain gap compared with foreign countries, especially in the competition with United States.
Dr. Wen Kai believes that in order to maintain its advantage or overtake in corners, the mainland also needs to strengthen basic research and talent training: continue to invest resources to strengthen the basic research of quantum computing, cultivate more quantum computing talents, and provide a steady stream of power for the development of the mainland in the field of quantum computing; and increase policy support and capital investment; Strengthen the exploration and expansion of application scenarios: Actively explore the application scenarios of quantum computing in AI, finance, communications and other fields, promote the commercial application of quantum computing technology, and provide new impetus for national economic development.
In addition, Dr. Wen Kai also mentioned Bose Quantum's corporate philosophy - "Climbing the Peak". "Our goal is to climb the world's highest peak of quantum computing technology, but we also have to keep our feet on the ground and take it one step at a time," he said. We believe that with a corporate philosophy like "Reaching the Peaks," smart people can come together and work towards the top, and they themselves can create outstanding results that will lead to a vision that will continue to push the boundaries of practical quantum computing and change the future. ”
As one of the future industries, quantum computing technology has great potential to break through the limits of traditional computing and lead the development of future science and technology. This technology is expected to enable more breakthroughs in more fields in the future. For example, in cryptography, drug design, and so on. At the same time, the cross-integration of quantum computing with other fields will give rise to new disciplines and technologies.
Overall, the future of quantum computing technology is promising. In Dr. Wen Kai's idea, the seamless integration of quantum computing power and classical computing power is the ultimate answer to the problem of computing power in various industries, and it will also realize the resonance and improvement of stronger computing power, so as to fully realize the "new quality integration, computing power resonance".
At the same time, he also revealed that after entering the era of quantum AI, Bose Quantum will redefine the basic computing power represented by the new generation of coherent optical quantum computer "Tiangong Quantum Brain 550W" with 550 computing qubits, the development kit represented by the "Kaiwu SDK" and the "quantum algorithm" jointly developed with multi-industry ecological partners, laying a solid foundation for continuously breaking through the boundaries of practical quantum computing and changing the future. This is also the direction of Bose Quantum's strategic layout in the field of quantum computing.