More than 20 researchers have exited jobs at Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other leading AI enterprises in recent weeks to join a Silicon Valley startup called Periodic Labs whose main goal is “to accelerate science,” focusing on areas including physics and chemistry. The venture has secured more than $300 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and started work at a makeshift facility in San Francisco as it lays groundwork for a dedicated Menlo Park facility where “physical robots” will run scientific experiments on a very large scale. Continue reading AI Startup Periodic Labs Raises $300M for Scientific Research

IBM has achieved a new milestone in chips developed for quantum computing with the newly debuted 433-qubit Osprey chip. That’s more than three times the qubits of the 127-qubit Eagle chip IBM introduced last year. The company has its sights set on a more than 4,000-qubit system that it plans to unveil in 2025. Quantum computers solve problems faster and more accurately than classical computers and can find exact solutions to problems that today’s top computers can only guess at, known as the “quantum advantage.” Eventually, quantum computers are expected to contain millions of qubits. Continue reading IBM’s New Osprey Processor Advances Quantum Computing

D-Wave Systems, which in 2011 became the first company to bring a working quantum computer to market, is diversifying beyond the quantum annealing approach that has been its bread and butter and entering the superconducting gate-model sector that will put it in direct competition with IBM. The Canadian company announced at its Qubits conference that it plans to make its first gate model commercially available in 2023 or 2024. While quantum annealing works well for certain specialized functions, gate-model quantum computing is considered more broadly applicable, in areas like materials science and pharmaceutical research. Continue reading D-Wave Plans a Commercial Gate-Model Quantum Computer