View / Google’s new research reveals real-life quantum use

Google’s quantum computing division has helped push the field forward with several significant breakthroughs in recent years. Most of those have helped answer whether such computers are possible to build at scale. The group’s latest contribution, published in Nature on Wednesday, addresses another important question: How will we realistically use quantum computers once they actually exist?

Researchers have shown how a quantum computer can be used to do nuclear magnetic resonance, a method of estimating the atomic structure of compounds. While this project, called Quantum Echoes, isn’t practically useful today — namely because the method used by Google’s researchers is still slower than typical computers — it could be a huge boon to science as the technology improves.

Today, scientists are extremely excited about how AI can be used to predict the way molecules interact, transforming areas like drug discovery and materials science. One of the challenges, though, is that those AI models have limited high-quality data to train on.

Large language models, by comparison, are great at predicting human speech because of all the different combinations of words, sentences, and paragraphs on the internet. Imagine, though, that all the books ingested by LLM training sets only contained the information on the dust jackets. That’s similar to where we are with science today.

Still, Google has made enormous strides in AI-powered scientific discovery. Its AlphaFold protein prediction project upended the field of biotech. Google has launched its own drug discovery spinoff, Isomorphic Labs, in hopes of leveraging those discoveries for its own financial gain.

Wednesday’s paper isn’t likely useful to Isomorphic today, but it brings into greater focus how the technological efforts across Google’s empire could one day come together for a huge gain, both scientifically and financially.