University of Kwazulu-Natal

While Everyone Was Watching Ai Quantum S Time Is Finally Here

Bonisiwe Shabane
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while everyone was watching ai quantum s time is finally here

A Rigetti quantum computer displayed at the Nvidia GTC in October. Step aside, artificial intelligence. Another transformative technology with the potential to reshape industries and reorder geopolitical power is finally moving out of the lab: quantum. The United Nations dubbed 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. It’s been marked by a flurry of announcements — and a mountain of hype — around a mind-boggling field of science long dismissed as perpetually a decade away from usefulness. But that’s how people talked about AI, too, before ChatGPT spurred the current global arms race and investor euphoria.

It’s fascinating to see how quantum computing, a technology that’s been talked about for more than two decades, is finally starting to cross the threshold of possibility into the realm of application. For years, it remained in the background while AI took center stage, grabbing headlines, funding, and fast-track adoption across enterprises. But now, quantum is making a strong, quiet move-not with a bang, but with a strategic build-up that’s gaining serious momentum. What’s driving this shift? It’s not just better hardware. It’s the fact that the ecosystem is maturing.

Companies like Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and Amazon are no longer just experimenting-they're building roadmaps, launching processors, and investing in quantum-ready cloud platforms. Microsoft recently unveiled "Majorana 1," a quantum chip based on topological qubits, a novel approach aimed at reducing errors and improving scalability. IBM, meanwhile, has crossed the 1,000-qubit mark with their Condor chip. And Amazon is taking a different route with its cat qubit-based approach, trying to solve error correction challenges in its own unique way. Unlike AI, which thrives on data abundance and is fairly modular in its deployment, quantum computing is a whole different beast. It doesn’t just plug into your existing enterprise stack.

It demands new logic, new algorithms, and in some cases, entirely new ways of thinking. That’s one reason why its adoption curve has been slower-the learning curve is steeper, the hardware is expensive, and the skill sets required are still niche. But the potential? Enormous. Think drug discovery, materials engineering, financial modeling-all at speeds and scales that today’s classical systems simply can’t match. Refer infographic below: McKinsey’s 2024 quantum technology ecosystem highlights a $173B potential market by 2040, with quantum computing alone estimated between $45B–$131B and over 367 start-ups already active across the ecosystem.

And here's the twist: while AI has democratized rapidly, quantum may not. Its power could remain in the hands of a few major players for a while. This creates a strategic race-not just to build, but to lead. And the stakes are high. Whoever cracks quantum advantage first could redefine what’s possible in computing, science, and industry. In the long arc of human history, there are moments when the very foundations of knowledge shift, when what was once unimaginable suddenly becomes possible.

Fire, the printing press, electricity, the internet—each of these breakthroughs reshaped society, expanding what humans could achieve. Today, we stand at the threshold of another such transformation: the union of quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence already feels like magic in our daily lives. It translates languages instantly, generates human-like conversations, creates images from imagination, diagnoses diseases, and powers self-driving cars. Yet even with all this progress, AI still runs on the classical computing hardware that has powered the digital age for decades. These machines, no matter how fast, are constrained by binary logic—ones and zeros.

Quantum computing, on the other hand, taps into the strange and beautiful rules of quantum mechanics. It does not think in binaries but in probabilities, superpositions, and entanglements. While still in its infancy, quantum computing promises an unprecedented leap in processing power and problem-solving capacity. When combined with AI, the potential becomes staggering: algorithms that learn faster, analyze deeper, and solve challenges beyond the reach of today’s technology. To explore what breakthroughs might emerge when quantum computing meets AI, we must first understand each on its own terms, and then imagine the future they could create together. Artificial intelligence is the attempt to replicate aspects of human cognition in machines.

Its roots stretch back to mid-20th-century pioneers like Alan Turing, who asked whether machines could think. From those early days of symbolic reasoning and rule-based systems, AI has blossomed into an ecosystem of machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and neural networks that mimic the architecture of the brain. Our mission is to build quantum computing for otherwise unsolvable problems. Marking a key step toward real-world applications, we've published a new breakthrough algorithm on our Willow quantum processor, Quantum Echoes, which demonstrates the first-ever verifiable quantum advantage. Willow, Google Quantum AI's latest state-of-the-art quantum chip, is a big step towards developing a large-scale, error-corrected quantum computer. Read the blog and watch the video to learn more about Willow and its breakthrough achievements.

View published research, blog posts, and educational resources from the Quantum AI team. Governments and tech companies continue to pour money into quantum technology in the hopes of building a supercomputer that can work at speeds we can't yet fathom to solve big problems. Imagine a computer that could solve incredibly complex problems at a speed we can't yet fathom and bring about breakthroughs in fields like drug development or clean energy. That is widely considered the promise of quantum computing. In 2025, tech companies poured money into this field. The Trump administration also named quantum computing as a priority.

But when will this technology actually deliver something useful for regular people? NPR's Katia Riddle reports on the difference between quantum hype and quantum reality. KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: Tech companies like Google and Microsoft, as well as the U.S. government, bet big on quantum computing in 2025. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Google Quantum AI is unveiling the first demonstration of verifiable quantum advantage. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Joining forces on quantum computing.

While the world is still grappling with the risks and ethical questions surrounding AI, an even more far-reaching revolution is quietly taking shape: the explosive union of quantum computing and next-generation, large-scale AI models. Think of this as “AI on steroids” — or, as some are calling it, the dawn of Quantized Intelligence. More on Tech EthicsIntroducing HX: a New Way to Think About Technology Recent breakthroughs in quantum computing have been nothing short of a Big Bang from both scientific and theoretical standpoints. The year 2029 — Ray Kurzweil’s once-futuristic prediction for when machine intelligence might surpass our own — now feels just around the corner. Giants like Amazon, IBM, Google and Microsoft are rolling out competing quantum technologies at a dizzying pace, each with different hardware approaches.

And the race to develop the middleware, software and apps that will use these quantum engines is accelerating by the day. Quantum computing won’t just speed up calculations in chemistry, materials science or cryptography. Its marriage with cutting-edge AI has the potential to solve some of the largest bottlenecks we currently face in AI systems — especially when it comes to security and the creation of entirely new... Yes, today’s foundation models — like OpenAI’s (reportedly imminent) GPT-5, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, or the new showstopper Grok — are already reshaping our information economy. But so far, they still rely on classical (binary) supercomputers. Integrating quantum algorithms could give these systems access to dimensions we can’t currently fathom.

Instead of linear calculations in static neural networks, future models might generate simultaneous probability distributions across millions of potential solutions. This form of pattern recognition is eerily akin to human intuition. 1207 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1228 Wilmington, DE 19806 United States 4048 Rue Jean-Talon O, Montréal, QC H4P 1V5, Canada 622 Atlantic Avenue, Geneva, Switzerland 456 Avenue, Boulevard de l’unité, Douala, Cameroon

The fusion of quantum computing and artificial intelligence isn’t just another tech buzzword. It’s reshaping how we approach the most complex computational challenges of our time. Recent research demonstrates that quantum AI algorithms already outpace the fastest supercomputers in specific machine learning tasks, marking the beginning of a computational revolution that will touch every industry. Quantum computers are the muscles behind AI. Our daily workflows and routine tasks have been infiltrated by artificial intelligence, whether or not you've noticed it. Things like Gemini's integration across Google products work in the background, giving you suggestions.

You might even be engaging more directly with chatbots and image generators like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Dall-E. And looming in the near future are more sophisticated virtual assistants. As if AI itself weren't futuristic enough, there's a new leap forward on the horizon: quantum AI. It's a fusion of artificial intelligence with unconventional and still largely experimental quantum computing into a super-fast, highly efficient technology. Quantum computers will be the muscles, while AI will be the brains. "My colleagues sometimes ask me why I left the burgeoning field of AI to focus on quantum computing," Hartmut Neven, founder of Google's Quantum AI lab, wrote in a December blog post introducing the...

"My answer is that both will prove to be the most transformational technologies of our time, but advanced AI will significantly benefit from access to quantum computing." Here's a quick breakdown of the basics to help you better understand quantum AI.

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