AI just helped work out one of quantum computing’s biggest open questions.
Physical Superintelligence Inc., or PSI, said Friday it used an unreleased model from Anthropic to prove the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture, a long-standing problem in quantum computing.
The physics research lab said the conjecture, which is essentially an educated guess that has not yet been proven, has been open since 2008 and concerns determining when quantum computers can be significantly faster than regular computers.
The lab developed a research system that included the Anthropic model. The system was able to prove the conjecture within three days, “settling one of the most fundamental questions in quantum computing,” PSI said.
“Quantum computing still has plenty of mysteries, but now there is one fewer,” the lab said.
The announcement marked the latest breakthrough in mathematics achieved with the help of AI. In September, OpenAI said it had solved a 90-year-old math problem, the Navier-Stokes equations, calling it “one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics.”
The AI disruption of mathematics has led many in the field to speculate what it will mean for their futures. Terence Tao, a prominent mathematics professor at UCLA, said last month that math’s “romantic era” was over, adding, “We are entering an era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost.”
Math students are also reconsidering their careers. MIT researchers who polled grad students and postdocs found 76% reported they were unlikely to stay in academic math after graduating, while the same amount said AI developments had made them less motivated to do research.
David Turturean, a member of the technical staff at PSI, developed the research system that used the unreleased Anthropic model to prove the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture.
It’s not clear what unreleased model PSI used. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.
The proof, PSI said, shows that certain exponential advantages of quantum computing require special patterns or structures, meaning quantum computers have limits, which was long suspected (though they’d still be a major upgrade for some tasks). While quantum computers exist, they are still in the early stages of development.
Researchers who had previously worked on the problem said the proof was a “huge result” that resolved a decades-old question.
“Everything is brought together in a rather magical way,” Guy Blanc, Jordan Docter, Carmen Strassle, and Li-Yang Tan of Stanford University said of the proof, according to PSI’s announcement.
