AI Diary Today Yesterday Tomorrow

Aug 4, 2026 -  IN THE NEWS - Fear of an AI Market Bubble: Communities worry about long-term risks if the AI boom cools down, leaving small towns stranded with empty, massive facilities or lingering environmental liabilities after companies move on or fail. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jasmine-sun.html?

Senior officials have considered a range of actions, including using sanctions, a trade blacklist against Chinese companies that make these open-source A.I. models, or even banning U.S. cloud companies from doing business with them, said five of the people, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. But after an outcry from Silicon Valley, they appear to have changed their minds and instead are focused on promoting American A.I. models to be more competitive, the people said. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/technology/ai-washington-regulation-whiplash.html

    wall st shuffle -but its not a bubble today - Major U.S. stock indices surged significantly, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 achieving new all-time highs. This broad-market rally has been primarily supported by strong corporate profits and a notable rebound in the technology sector, easing earlier market anxieties.

THIS DAY IN HISTORY - Ludwig Boltzmann worked on statistical mechanics using probability to describe how the properties of atoms determine the properties of matter. In particular his work relates to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which he derived from the principles of mechanics in the 1890s. This work was taken up in other spheres by Shannon, Wiener, Hopfield, others. Depressed by scientific, Boltzmann unsuccessfully attempted suicide during his time in Leipzig... https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Boltzmann

quote Available energy is the main object at stake in the struggle for existence and the evolution of the world. - Boltzmann Quoted in D'A W Thompson On Growth and Form (Cambridge 1917)

Boltzmann: His was the psyche of tumult. He saw what others did not, and he paid a personal price for this vision. -JV  

Quantum Supremacy: Are we not quite there yet?

 

54 quantum logic gates (or qubits) (53 for computation) - Sycamore of Google.

The atmosphere is tense, uncertain, ominous … a reminder in a way of how it was in March of 1964 when the young Cassius Clay took on the larger Sonny Liston. All eyes are on Google and IBM, as they square off in a battle for quantum dominance that, some wags say, will not soon be settled.

A slip of a curfew gave indications Google would soon announce it had achieved Quantum Supremacy. This is a long-anticipated moment in some technology quarters, and Google’s competitors were on alert for something akin to a prize fight.

Quantum Supremacy is the moment at which researchers could declare quantum computers capable of solving problems that have been beyond the reach of classical computing machines. It is important to AI and big data users that may be finding the limits of silicon microprocessors that have tapped out Gordon Moore’s Law of never-ending computing improvements.

Now back to that missed curfew. Google Research’s collaborators at NASA had inadvertently posted a paper meant to be held until this week, when Nature magazine would publish the findings of quantum dominance. The miscue gave quantum competitor IBM time to prepare its defense, suggesting Google drastically mis-estimated the capabilities of today’s best classical computers in its analysis, and that quantum supremacy wasn’t such a big deal anyway.

Google had gauged it would take IBM’s Summit supercomputer 10,000 years to perform a random number validation task that its 54-gate Sycamore quantum engine could complete in 200 seconds. With enough memory, IBM countered, “we could do much better than 10,000 years.” IBM’s Summit could instead do the job in a couple of days, the company said.

IBM has reasonable bones to pick with Google’s quantum supremacy experiment. The small tempest obscures the likelihood that quantum computing is getting closer, but is still quite far off. That has been the status all along.

Google and IBM are only two of many players in the quantum quest. But their slight spat has put them at the forefront of attention.

For Google, quantum computing appears to be an exercise in pure research, to which any usefulness in clipping added time off Google searches would be a bonus.

For IBM on the other hand, quantum computing has become one of the fundamental elements in a quest – think Watson -- to claim a prerogative to lead the next computing era.

Google’s announcement is late in some ways. Google has taken a particular interest in the quantum supremacy hurdle and, when I was researching the topic in 2017 – a very fevered year of what now seem like chimerical quantum advances -- an announcement by Google had been fairly widely expected to be imminent.

That Google’s announcement has come nearly two years later with concomitant noise, flutter and thud is something that could have been anticipated. Going forward, error correction, entanglement, fault tolerance and other factors present obstacles at every step along the way.

Always stalking the effort: classic computers may still be capable of bone-jarring breakthroughs.

What will be interesting to watch is the interplay between classical computing advances and quantum computing advances.

While classical computing has been good enough to continually exceed a lot of needs, scientists doing research at the atomic and molecular level have tapped out much of classical approaches’ potential.

Putting this week’s quantum family feud aside, the work on machine learning and quantum simulation by scientists could provide the kind of inflection point that is worthy of the computing community’s expectant wait. Both IBM and Google seem to agree that advances in materials science could be a breakthrough application.

Related

Quantum computing apps creep forwardly - SearchEAI (2017)
Timeline of quantum - Wiki
On quantum supremacy - IBM
Google's quantum Nature article - Nature
Quantum supremacy: The gloves are off - Scott Araonson blog (100+ comments and counting)
Chemistry as quantum computing killer app - CEN.ACS

Cant delegate responsibility

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith testifies before House Judiciary Commi...

Lutnick Says It's All Allright

If they had the right digital rules, meaning similar digital rules to the

United States, we have $6 trillion worth of committed investment to build data

centers in America, and we have a $30 trillion economy.

So if they had a $20 trillion economy, you'd say, okay, if they had the same

rules, they could get 4 trillion. Or how about 2 trillion?

You realize 2 trillion for their economy, right?

Would be ten points of GDP spread over three or four years.

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Where's the money, Sam?

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