In a wide-ranging interview with VentureBeat, quantum computing startup IonQ chief executive Peter Chapman talks about quantum computing’s future impact on AI and ML. From the interview: The conversation quickly turned to Strong AI, or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which does not yet exist. Strong AI is the idea that a machine could one day understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can. “AI in the Strong AI sense, that I have more of an opinion [about], just because I have more experience in that personally,” Chapman told VentureBeat. “And there was a really interesting paper that just recently came out talking about how to use a quantum computer to infer the meaning of words in NLP. And I do think that those kinds of things for Strong AI look quite promising. It’s actually one of the reasons I joined IonQ. It’s because I think that does have some sort of application.” […] “For decades, it was believed that the brain’s computational capacity lay in the neuron as a minimal unit,” he wrote. “Early efforts by many tried to find a solution using artificial neurons linked together in artificial neural networks with very limited success. This approach was fueled by the thought that the brain is an electrical computer, similar to a classical computer.”

“However, since then, I believe we now know the brain is not an electrical computer, but an electrochemical one,” he added. “Sadly, today’s computers do not have the processing power to be able to simulate the chemical interactions across discrete parts of the neuron, such as the dendrites, the axon, and the synapse. And even with Moore’s law, they won’t next year or even after a million years.” Chapman then quoted Richard Feynman, who famously said “Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical. And by golly, it’s a wonderful problem because it doesn’t look so easy. Similarly, it’s likely Strong AI isn’t classical, it’s quantum mechanical as well,” Chapman said.

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Source: Slashdot – IonQ CEO Peter Chapman on How Quantum Computing Will Change the Future of AI