Quantum computing shorts
I don’t have time in my life to fling poop on all the insanely fake (and gay) things in the world, but readers take note: there are several pure quantum computing plays available for shorting on the market if you can find a borrow. SEC disclaimer: I don’t, won’t (unless there is a new one not on this list) and never have knowingly held or shorted any of these (my IRA is managed by someone else). There are all kinds of interesting facts about these rapidly disintegrating clown cars available on Yahoo finance and so on. The question of who buys this garbage seems worthy, as it seems to generalize.
First up is IONQ. Scorpion capital has a very amusing report on them. You can access it here. It’s 183 pages of scornful laughter at the impostures of the frauds and “respected academic” founders involved in this turkey. Historically, the yahoo price series claims some imbeciles paid 37 buckaroonies a share for these clowns. As of now they’re still over a 4 bucks a share, which is a stunning success in the publicly traded quantum world; also biggest opportunity for a short. The CEO has a bunch of “AI” gibberish in his linkedin, and used to head up engineering for Amazon Prime, which, as I recall, is a button on Amazon’s website. He also used to work for Ray Kurzweil, which isn’t something I’d brag about. As the Scorpion boys pointed out the CTO and Chief scientist are both real quantum computing experts (for all that’s worth) who appear to be part time as they continue to be active faculty members doing all kinds of faculty things. Interesting that a VC firm holds a decent tranche.
Dwave, to my amazement, IPOed (via reverse SPAC, like so many of these turkeys) back in August of 2022 -they’ve been a publicly traded company for longer than I’ve been procrastinating about writing this. Dwave has been around for 20 years mind you, and while it produces some kind of hardware that quantum information enthusiasts have been gesticulating at for a while now, it certainly doesn’t do anything recognizably quantum, and arguably not really computing either. The present CEO used to be involved in popularizing Java<tm> somehow for Sun Microsystems. They’re a Canadian company, so their outstanding shares are mostly held by some large Canook pension fund. Reminder: Trudeau is an enthusiast of this nonsense (also one of my buddies, a hero, punched him in the face). Goldman in the number two spot seems to sum up to more than their float, which is a bit confusing, but probably some kind of artifact of how it is calculated. Behind them, Lockheed, who I believe is their biggest customer.
Another member of the clown-car parade is Rigetti computing. Peaked at $12 a share, now under a dollar. Rigetti himself has fled the sinking ship; resigning as director back in December of 2022. Apparently right before layoffs. I always thought Rigetti were particularly obviously bullshit, just based on the antics of the founder. A founder who is admittedly trained in the quantum computing field, and a bona-fide “expert” for whatever that is worth. Their prospectus was a laugh riot right before the SPAC merger/IPO: it was/is clownishly insane. Rigetti, astoundingly is/was listed on NASDAQ, though it is facing delisting based on its share price. To my amusement, they are held by a couple of mutual funds and indexes (presumably NASDAQ index trackers) as well as a venture fund who presumably underwrote them.
There is another … Quantum Computing Inc. It used to be the Innovative Beverage Group Holdings (QUBT nee IBGH). The nature of ticker swaps and name changes make it difficult to understand what they did before. As far as I can tell they used to sell FIJI water, Jolt Cola, and Arizona Iced tea products in Texas. Lord only knows what shenanigans they’re up to (women’s tech!), and I can’t be arsed to make my way through their 10Qs so …. rotsa ruck with this one. The CEO seems to concurrently be president and director of a bunch of other weird scammy software companies with a vaguely defense orientation and used to be Chief Information Officer for the Coca Cola company, cementing the connection between big beverage and big qubit. Honestly someone could do a Ph.D. on this guy; it looks like they hired him (at two and a half million bucks a year -an insane figure for a small company operating at a loss) to get QUBT acquired by Harris or some other big military oriented firm. They have a CTO who is an “expert” in quantum information woo who also used to work for Harris. They have an offering; it’s some kind of software allegedly related to quantum computard. To be fair they managed to survive selling sugar water at a loss, so they might surprise us with an AI name change in the future.
I assume Jane Street is making markets in them. No idea what Geode is doing; maybe they show up if you’re short. Remember that the next time someone tells you to just buy an index fund or a mutual fund. Index funds are propping this bullshit up, just like they’re propping up the fact that Yahoo has a “sustainability” column. I’m sure the list of bullshit the index funds are propping up is very long now. While the concept of an index fund is sound (average many things together to lower your risk), the entire idea is nihilism unless some thought has been put into the index components. Think about it: how is Capitalism supposed to work if you just mindlessly buy whatever index some knucklehead tells you is an index? You could at least remove overt frauds like these. VCs are the real culprits though. Their hype machines are how this nonsense gets started.
The chasing after of hyped up useless, mislabeled and nonexistent technologies now continues with LLM neural doodads being called “AI.” The technologies for chatbots have existed in comparably useful form for a decade. The idea …. well, Claude Shannon had something like this which worked with pencil and paper in the 40s and 50s. Sure the implementation is a little different: now you fit your models to legions of NPC Redditors. This seems to be good enough to fool the types of people the model was fit to: slow-bus Redditor types probably make up half of the population of Venture Capitalists. The same people who think chatGPT is something amazing: these same NPC knuckle heads were telling us about Google’s quantum supremacy claims (Google made a “quantum” random number generator) a couple of years ago. How is regurgitating that press release working out for you, Reddit man?
The idea that a nonexistent technology from a fake subject should be traded on the stock market is …. laughably insane. Buying shares in a quantum computing company is on all fours with buying shares in a perpetual motion company: the physics really doesn’t check out experimentally. Sure some “theorists” tell you things based on mathematics, but if the last 30-40 years haven’t taught you that theorists suck at reality, there’s not much hope for you. If you want to build machinery which does specific things, you need experimental evidence such machinery is buildable. Remember when Nanotech was going to be a trillion dollar industry by 2015? That’s another set of shorts you could have done. What’s next? Are we going to have time machine startups? Will we have warp drive startups? There are, after all, various attention whore “theoretical physicists” speculating about these things. You even get yoyos putting various objects in a vacuum chamber and claiming things about time travel and warp drives.
I’m not asking for a lot; before you list your company, you should have a prototype that does something useful that someone might one day pay for. It’s OK to invest in long term technological moon shots, but only if there is a quantifiable plan for achieving them. When you go back to early space flight pioneers, it was pretty obvious how they were going to do things, and what kinds of industries you’d have to develop to support the efforts. Their early theoretical works for space travel have lots of equations involving the tensile strength of aluminum and magnesium, the potential thermodynamic efficiency of various rocket nozzle designs, fuel and oxidizer requirements (and implied capabilities for supplying them), and gaps in turbopump capabilities what would have to be sorted out with a hefty R&D budget. It was all eminently practical stuff compared to current year woo. Mind you Tsiolkovsky was writing about rockets in outer space before there were freaking airplanes. Oberth wrote a practical book on rockets in space in 1922 when men still wore frock coats. There were actual rockets in space 35 years later. Pioneering ideas always look like this: people talk about practical stuff like “what will you make your rocket out of” or “how do you get the propellant to the combustion chamber” or “use 3 stages to get into space.”
Quantum computing: nobody knows how to build any of it. No gates, no readouts, no error correction; they have none of the necessary parts, supporting technologies and practical knowledge of anything involving their physical embodiments. All we have are quantum computard gibbering about qubits and muh “it’s just engineering.” If it’s just engineering, I’d like to see some of it. Show me a plausible and detailed mechanism for making an error corrected qubit, the materials that will be used, the physical design that will embody the thing, then construct an R&D program around achieving it: including budget, parallel approaches/alternative materials, and go/no-go checkpoints. Nobody does this, because the entire field is fraud and imposture: it’s a lot easier writing papers on some dumb algorithm for the non-existent computer, or, like, writing unphysical “simulators” or “compilers” for the damn fool non-things. Mind you I’m only talking about the error corrected qubit: the gates, readout mechanisms, you can’t even talk about these until you have a proper error corrected qubit.
The impending market collapse of these “quantum computer” companies probably won’t change anything in academia -there are so many clowns doing this, more seem inevitable. Modern academic subject reproduce asexually, like amoebas: the existence of a large group of them implies more are coming. The government welfare cheese will continue, despite the fact that “industry leaders” in the field are overt frauds. People will still gibber about “post quantum” encryption. Reddit spergeloids will continue to attempt to mimic intelligence by writing programs for imaginary computers. People will continue getting PhDs in this nonsense, and I’ll keep getting my steaks from them medium rare.
If you haven’t seen it before:
Locklin on science 
QUBT hahaha. Great post.
That was funny. “… which, as I recall, is a button on the Amazon website.” Very Hooli box. I think you said once that you didn’t watch Silicon Valley because it hit too close to home. If you haven’t, you should watch. One of the best shows.
In all fairness to those asset managers, those are really small allocations. Even the 2nd grade show-and-tell Geode dudes are at close to a $T of AUM, so nobody’s losing their shirts on penny SPAC moonshots. But your point about where we are at, how nth order everything is in the hyperverse… not only is there not a box, there’s just some equations. I was having a conversation with someone the other day about how many pubs there are now on XYZ algo on a quantum computer. VaR, OLS, name your ML/Stats/Optimization widget, people are publishing in droves classical problems recast as quantum. If they think that, one day, they’ll be cited, they are nuts, if only because nobody will wade through all the preprint drivel that’s piling up.
Upcoming blerg poast talks about SV show a little and a couple of SV phenomena it misses (whores and thirsty nerds basically: if it ever addresses this -please LMK which episodes).
You might enjoy this article; it touches on almost every relevant sociological note: https://www.thecut.com/article/inside-diy-rape-kit-startup-leda-health.html
Part of the problem seem to be that selling an actual finished product to an actual customer in an actual store isn’t at all what is being aimed at. Instead you have this incestuous world of investors pumping companies to dump them on buyers, who presumably don’t care that there is no mechanism for revenue other than additional hot-potato games (sometimes because, like my damn mutual fund, they are asleep at the wheel.) (I got out before the crash. I have no idea when or even if it will ever be time to put my money back in. Is there a bottom to this twilight-zone hellscape?)
Maybe all prospective customers are too poor and dispossessed to be a source of money. Money doesn’t come from people buying things, it comes from “investors” who just always seem to have it in arbitrary amounts.
Actually, that’s probably it.
Tax laws and the way companies operate force people to save money in IRAs for retirement. Pensions (which have proven to be lies much of the time) are passe.
This leaves a massive amount of money exposed to predation. This entire circus of pseudo-entrepreneurship is just some kind of fig-leaf over raiding everyone’s pension accounts. They can’t withdraw them early without being hammered by a penalty (which is actually a lot less than they would have lost last year.) The firms doing the investment either have some kind of corrupt relationship with the psuedo-innovators, or they’re just dumb.
This is a fake economy being powered by the exothermic combustion of everyone’s retirement.
Very good find, and very likely a Silicon Valley Camp Follower. Hampster Collitch even.
https://twitter.com/martyrdison/status/1462943070203224072 lol @ Parik Patel fan club!
BTW The Cut is one of my favorite online magazines: the incredibly vile and stupid concerns of urban American white women. I assume it’s all some kind of viral marketing to get people to join ISIS, but people tell me New York Magazine runs it..
That article gave me the idea for a shaft-mounted medical grade suction device I should get funded and try out at colleges in Florida and Texas. With a battery pack discreetly tucked in one’s perineum, and a collection bag that is flesh-colored (w/ or w/o hair options) and camouflaged amongst thy satchel, the “anti MeToo kit” will quietly collect any trace of your being there immediately post-coitus. Simply escape to the bathroom post-deed and flush the biodegradable, certified organic, and fair trade collection bag.
This radio advice dude used to suggest putting tabasco sauce in your soiled condoms to avoid paternity lawsuits. Nosey people who use my bathroom would occasionally ask why I kept little bottles of tabasco sauce in the medicine cabinet.
Kind of a massive step down in what we aim at also:
Let’s build aircraft to realize the ancient dream of human flight.
Let’s build rockets to conquer space
Let’s build nuclear reactors to put nigh-infinite energy into the hands of mankind
Let’s build computers to actually do all the math we can’t get at through rigid algebra, and explore conceptual space.
….
Le’ts build quantum computers harnessing (presumably) parallel worlds so we can break RSA and finally lay everyone’s soul bare before the Eye of Sauron.
Saw something random the other day about Leonardo da Vinci’s helicopter: Apparently he realized that the rotation rate for his screw would have to be significantly faster than any rotary thing of the time (wagon axles and waterwheels and the like). He was sketching stuff that looked like bearing designs to try to deal with it the friction.
Even though he had no idea how to get there from the 1500s (and it was a long way from practical), he was nevertheless working the sub-problems.
Dear Scott, that’s funny and nice, as usual!
This world is becoming more and more crazy and comical at the same time.
Have you seen my 2020 Springer Booklet?
A free copy can be found here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340940709_Will_We_Ever_Have_a_Quantum_Computer
^^^^ Highly recommended if anyone is interested in the topic from a technical standpoint.
Thanks for the book reference. It gives a lot of straightforward estimates on why QC is bullshit.
Then the was a reminder that in a classical limit QC is an analog computer, not digital one that the very misleading word “qbit” tries to give.
So before building a quantum computer with thousands of qbits one should try to build a device that controls thousands, for example, of tiny tightly packed spindles, with precise control of orientation of each spindle in presence of substantial external noise.
There were some interesting ideas in analog computing, now absorbed into quantum woo world. Of course nobody tried to build the classical versions of, say Toffoli gates. I think Wolfram more or less lifted these older analog ideas in his weird books.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=toffoli&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=1980&as_yhi=1993
The ideas may have been flawed somehow; the classic alternative computing architecture blunder is sneaking in a real number somewhere capable of infinite bit encoding. On the other hand, a general analog computing architecture would be very powerful and useful. Even the ones done with optics or plug boards were in use through the 90s.
http://www.righto.com/2019/09/reverse-engineering-precision-op-amps.html
I suppose if we ever see them again, it will be for neural nets that work more like liquid state machines.
I’m still staggered by the fact that someone actually lot money selling sugar and caffeine to Americans – now that takes some talent.
Many such companies only exist for the benefit of their board members/officers.
Sooooo, what’s the next technoscam to short? Also, is there a search engine worth using in present era?
I use brave and yandex exclusively. Once in a great while I have to resort of bing or google for finding spicy memes I didn’t properly file away in my folders.
Also, is there a search engine worth using in present era?
The better question to ask is: is there anything worth searching on the web in the present era? The web has been centralized so that much of the activity is a few big sites, like YouTube, Wikipedia, various social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Reddit), etc. with all their biases and annoyances. Even worse is how many ‘independent’ sites are just mass of text, either generated with AI or written by some NPC type, optimized for search engines but are annoying to read. The personal websites of the 1990’s, the web forums and the blogs are mostly dead, with a few exceptions.
Seems to me that you are better off making more targeted searches on specific sites.
Do you have any examples of one of these modern startups *succeeding* at a technology that lives in the real world of matter? (Your references to Klein-1 organizations – any of those still around anywhere?) The rest of the VC investment bafflegab circus seems like somethings gone seriously wrong with business in general.
The only successful matter startups with silicon valley roots I know of are Elon’s. Tesla overcame a bunch of difficult problems. Same with rocket thing.
I wrote about maybe doing similar research a few weeks ago in my article on the hype around quantum computers (https://unfashionable.substack.com/p/quantum), spurred largely by a recent (insane) article in the New Yorker and the overrated bullshit paper by a group of Chinese “researchers”:
“I might publish some more detailed research about a few public quantum computing companies one could short. In general, shorting overhyped science seems to be an underserved market in the hedge fund world.”
While doing some preliminary research, I came across the most incredible product video from a company called Multiverse Computing (unfortunately not public) – pure comedy gold: https://multiversecomputing.com/product
Very nice Landauer quote. It’s funny I was thinking “gee didn’t he die a long time ago” -in fact he did, but this shit has been going on for a long time!
Indeed – and arguably not much real progress has been made which is why all the old critique still holds up so unreasonably well.
As I said in my older blog on the subject I went to a Gordon Conference on quantum computing (“quantum information theory” hadn’t been invented yet) around that time …. and nothing changed! Just more people involved.
Haha – a few years ago, before I dropped out of university, I spent my free time attending lectures that sounded interesting, and one of them was quantum information theory. At that time I was still impressed by the mathematics, but fortunately managed to get bored with it at some point. I only found out a year later that it was all vaporware.
Sadly, many are not that fortunate and fall down the rabbit hole before developing a good bullshit detector.
Sven, that video was indeed gold. MVO on a quantum computer. Amazing. We’ve been waiting 50 years to be able to do this and now it’s all possible.
Jeebers I thought it was a parody.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/multiverse-computing
The Linkedin pages of those dudes rock. The hypewagon is rolling strong in Barcelona, not just Palo Alto. I can’t imagine having a resume that reads eight years long rocking these accomplishments:
• Tackling open problems in industry using quantum computing;
• Leading a start-up to scale to unicorn;
• Addressing present day use-cases in finance, energy management, and smart manufacturing.
• Establishing contact with founders of disruptive startups in quantum technology;
• Validating companies’ technology and business model in view of investment;
• Creating a worldwide network of scientific advisers;
• Representing the fund at scientific conferences and business fairs.
• Catalyzing the uptake of quantum technologies by industry;
• Identifying and assessing financial opportunities;
• Writing grant applications;
• Creating scientific and industrial partnerships;
• Website building and developing online presence.
I liked that after the Multiverse Quantum Optimization it displayed a negative 0.6 Sharpe ratio.
There can’t possibly be any funny business here though; the website clearly states that they have an ethics committee.
That was one of many things which made me think it was a parody.
I was sitting in on a quantum computing seminar, and thought I heard something to the effect that the error rate in current quantum computers is exponential to the number of entangled qubits. If this is the case, then the error-correction attempts based on requiring additional qubits to suppress a finite amount of error may be doomed, since the errors will always grow with the code length.
I concur on quantum computing as bullshit. AI is another major crock. Whole careers are built on BS. Check out a public health prof at UCB who does cell phone cancer. Really criminal. i’m
They’ve been singing the cell tower cancer thing since the early 90s at least: I was required to listen to this charlatan tell me about it in 1991 at a summer internship:
https://www.cmu.edu/epp/people/emiriti-faculty/indira-nair.html
Machine learning is real, and can be useful (I use it!), but “AI” is total nonsense.
was thinking about this exact topic the last few months and did all the same research. won’t repeat the zingers in the scorpion report but boggles the mind how anyone could work for that company unless they were bleeding it dry at the expense of investors. They’re all under a dollar now except ionq, I guess if I were less dumb I could have profited from shorting these. The IONQ shares have somehow been propped up at $5 for a year now despite non stop bad news so I couldn’t tell you when it finally sinks. I guess if the theoretical technology you are trying to build won’t exist for 50 more years, it probably won’t exist at all.
This shit has actually held up the computer science and in particular theoretical computer science fields because people have been working on quantum algorithms and verifying security concerns of virtually unusable security specs on the off chance someone makes an actual quantum computer in the next century. There’s a self serving aspect of it but it’s also fucking stupid because a ton of research can still be done on “non quantum safe” things that people are being encouraged not to do because it will all be useless if this piece of shit device exists at some point. It’s holding up actual useful technology.
Not only that but the same specs have leaked into the corporate world and you see Google and other companies now pushing “quantum safe” key sizes and algorithms on people. Google does it in the browser with TLS. It’s absolutely retarded because it’s literally a waste of time. The longer key sizes just take more time to do the cryptography, for nothing. At this point I doubt quantum computers will ever exist. It’s the same as people thinking flying cars would exist by 2000.
Oh and there was a major break in a supposedly quantum safe encryption algorithm found in the last year using a result mathematicians knew about a long time ago. So this stuff is a cancer.
As I said in my original poast on this subject, I’d been to a Gordon Conference in this 20-25 years ago, and people literally still talking about the same shit. Thousands of phds in this issued since then. The main difference is now people talk about “post quantum” in startups.
Hey Scott,
I Don’t know anywhere else to ask you a question,
I am doing a degree in Economics at the moment, I know the field is bullshit and has no use, but I can’t switch degrees( Not allowed in the UK), So the hell do I do now?? IK I will have to get the degree, don’t really want to end up at any of the consulting, BB or IB or Big 4 firms.
Wat Do, Plz tell
Cheers
Infiltrate the government.
Start learning a physical world skill–plumbing, welding, electrician etc.–that you think you’d like to do. When you graduate with your degree, get a bullshit job that you can tolerate long enough to get credentialed in the other thing, then quit and be useful to your community.
So how do you go about short-selling a stock anyway?
(I could/should do the homework myself, and probably will if I decide to try it.)
You just need a brokerage account with margin. The mechanics (which are usually invisible and irrelevant) are you borrow the stock from holders, intermediated by the broker, then you sell the stock. When you get into small, illiquid, or heavily-shorted stocks, the cost to borrow can get really high (10s or even 100s of % annual rate).
I’ve tried out DWave a few times over the years, and never got anywhere. The last time I looked at it their demos of map coloring seemed impressive, so I tried one of my work problems on it. But it quickly broke down as I scaled up from toy examples, yielding random noise well before it got anywhere near useful. Of course, that could be my lack of “quantum computing” expertise, but that’s always a convenient excuse, isn’t it..
There’s some open interest in long-ish dated put options, if you cannot find reasonably-priced IONQ borrow, https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/IONQ/options?expiration=2024-01-19-m
And QTUM ETF is somehow a thing, so you could try short QTUM, long actual tech.
It’s pretty clear that “AI” is getting hyped up in a similar way by people who are just as unqualified to talk about it–does anyone here know of any good posts anywhere that attempt to actually tackle the bullshit? I’m interested in putting something together myself so I’d love to see some prior work if any exists that’s worthwhile.
I’ve found this blog to be predictive over the last couple of years https://blog.piekniewski.info/
I see some good stuff here, thanks!
^^^^ very good articool