Dr. Anthony J. Annunziata, IBM, Director and General Manager (Product, Engineering and GTM), AI and Quantum Accelerated Science.
Dr. Anthony leads a global team bringing together foundation model and generative AI, quantum, and high performance hybrid cloud computing to deploy a revolutionary new technology platform to accelerate discovery and solution creation in science and business.
As a core part of this mission, Anthony and team are cultivating a new community of partners, developers and scientists to advance the application of this advanced technology to challenges in health, climate, energy, manufacturing, and beyond that are crucial to societal progress and prosperity.
Keynote: AI, Quantum, and AI + Quantum: What’s Real, What’s Coming, and What’s the Point?
The world keeps marching forward in two foundation-changing technologies: AI, and Quantum Computing. AI is and has been here, and rapidly advancing; foundation models trained on multi-modal data and useful for a multiplicity of tasks are advancing by the day. Real use cases for generative AI are taking off, for consumers, for developers, and for businesses. Applications in science and health are some of the most promising. At IBM and many other places, researchers and developers have come together to use AI to find new materials and drug candidates, to assist doctors with diagnosis and care delivery, and beyond.
Meanwhile, quantum computing has been advancing steadily from dream to experiment and now getting close to practical reality for some select applications. We’re through the hype of the 2018-2021 period in quantum, and with recent announcements we are marching steadily toward useful-scale machines integrated as first class infrastructure in the cloud that developers can build on, using serverless functions powered by QPUs alongside CPUs, GPUs, and other novel chips and systems.
And now we are starting to think about orchestration among quantum and classical resources for highly automated and accelerated workflows for complex problems like automated scientific discovery and synthesis. While much of this is still squarely in the future category, so was an AI that could pass the Bar exam only a year ago.
In my talk I’ll provide both highlights and a clear point of view across this progress, highlight key challenges at the data, compute, platform, and application levels today and opportunities to solve them in the near future to enable AI + Quantum progress.
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