They call this milestone quantum advantage. The first conclusive demonstration of quantum advantage will be an historic achievement. Catalyzed by that moment, we expect advantage will then be reached over and over again, in new markets and new domains, and along new dimensions of speed, quality, or cost. At Rigetti, they believe the pursuit of quantum advantage will shape the industry over the next 5 years.

All the technology they build at Rigetti is aligned to this pursuit. They recently shared our plans to make a 128-qubit system available in 2019, along with investments at the application layer to develop algorithms in quantum chemistry, machine learning, and optimization. Many promising quantum algorithms involve an iterative feedback loop between quantum and classical computations to arrive at an optimal solution. These algorithms can provide a path to near-term quantum advantage by using orders of magnitude fewer qubits than perfectly fault-tolerant machines would require. Yet none of the quantum computing services available today were built to support this programming model.