The Nvidia CEO, Huang says he was wrong about the timeline for quantum computing

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang backed on Thursday the comments he made in January, when he doubted if the useful quantum computers would reach the market in the next 15 years.

In the “Quantum Day” event of Nvidia, part of the company’s annual GTC conference, Huang admitted that his comments went wrong.

“This is the first event in history in which a company’s CEO invites all the guests to explain why it was wrong,” said Huang.

In January, Huang sent existence of quantum computing staggering When he said that 15 years were “on the early side” when considering how long it would happen before technology was useful. He said at that time that 20 years was a time frame that “a lot of us would believe.”

In his initial comments on Thursday, Huang made comparisons between quantum companies prior to income and the first days of Nvidia. He said Nvidia took more than 20 years to build her software and hardware business.

He also expressed surprise that his comments could move the markets, and joked that he did not know that certain quantum computing companies were negotiated publicly.

“How could a quantum computer company be public?” Huang said.

The event included panels with representatives of 12 quantum companies and new companies. It represents a kind of truce between Nvidia, which makes more traditional computers and the quantum computing industry. Several quantum executives shot Nvidia after Huang’s previous comments.

A third panel included representatives of Microsoft and Amazon Web services, which are also investing in quantum technology and are among Nvidia’s most important customers.

Nvidia has another reason to hug when. As quantum computers are being built, much of the research on them is carried out through simulators in powerful computers, such as those sold by NVIDIA.

It is also possible that a quantum computer requires a traditional computer to operate it. Nvidia is working to provide technology and software to integrate graphics processing units (GPU) and quantum chips.

“Of course, quantum computing has the potential and all our hopes that it offers an extraordinary impact,” Huang said Thursday. “But technology is incredibly complicated.”

Nvidia said this week that will build a research center in Boston to allow quantum companies to collaborate with Harvard researchers and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The center will include several shelves from the company’s Blackwell AI servers.

Quantum Computing has been a dream of physicists and mathematicians since the 1980s, when the professor of the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, proposed for the first time the idea behind a quantum computer.

While classic computers use bits that are 0 or 1, bits inside a quantum computer, qubits, end up on or deactivated according to probability. Experts predict that technology will be able to solve problems with massive amounts of possible solutions, such as deciphering codes, delivering or simulating chemistry or weather.

No quantum computer has However, he beat a computer When solving a real and useful problem. But Google claimed At the end of last year that discovered a way of making errors correction.

A question on the panel focused on whether quantum computing coulds some day threaten companies such as NVIDIA that make transistor -based computers.

“A long time ago, someone asked me: ‘So, why did the computer accelerated well?'” Huang said on the panel. Accelerated computer science is a phrase that it uses to refer to the type of GPU computers that NVIDIA does.

“I said, a long time ago, because I was wrong, this will replace computers,” he said. “This will be the way computer science is done, and everything will be better. And it turned out that it was wrong.”

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