How GPT‑5.6 Sol helps run quantum computing experiments (openai.com)

51 pointsby theanonymousone2 hours ago32 comments

Leonard_of_Q 13 minutes ago

My neighbour - a few hundred metres further up the road - has two dogs, one of which a surefire genius as it has no problems barking out 334543333-bit RSA factorisations. It must have been solving NP-complete problems for years by now, night after night.

lompad an hour ago

Relevant paper [0] "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog"

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf

Oarch 20 minutes ago

Something about the look of quantum computers takes me right back to the ENIAC.

throwaway63467 an hour ago

I had qubit bring up and calibration fully automated with Python in 2011 including full spectrum measurements, lifetime characterization, Rabi/Ramsey measurements, calibration of single qubit gates and two qubit swap gates and full quantum process tomography, so not sure if AI is really needed there, curve fitting and some data logging is enough for this. Even had a nice LabView like GUI but with PyQT, it was quite nice. Still of course cool, I guess today I would just let Codex loose on some experiment goals but in the end my ability to produce results was mostly limited by the chip itself and the qubit lifetimes and theres no magic trick AI can apply to make these go up by a factor of 10. Still would’ve saved me a lot of time for routine programming tasks I imagine and that seems to be the main takeaway of the article. I guess name dropping quantum computing makes this sound cooler but in principle it’s just automation that you can apply anywhere, nothing quantum computing specific here.

giacomoforte an hour ago

Even with AI you'd want the AI to be writing python scripts instead of following an analysis.md.

raverbashing an hour ago

It will be fun if the AI realize that quantum is not needed and just simulate the results in a classical computer

qsera an hour ago

Some body compared AI as something like a big boulder rolling down a mountain, decimating anything that lies in its path. After giving it a bit of thought, I feel that what humanity is doing with LLM is exactly that.

The problem is not that it is super smart. It is that it is super dumb and super powerful. Like a boulder falling down.

Humanity is like this bunch of utter morons who has rolled a big boulder up a big mountain and let it loose at the top, and standing at the bottom is clapping and cheering seeing it coming down, guided by random collisions in its path, and with real probability that it will land on them....

teiferer an hour ago

The right tool for the job. There are tasks for which LLMs are unbelievably helpful. In programming, used well, it can 10x your productivity. (Well maybe not literally, but Nx for non-trivial N.) I've seen really good programmers become even faster since the LLM is doing the grunt work for them and the code produced in the end is just as top notch quality as they produced before, just that now they are much faster.

Of course you can misuse it. Produce mountains of unmaintainable slop, full of issues. But that's true for every tool. Before LLMs already, and there will be future tools too.

So, careful with generalizations please. It's not all just dumb.

alansaber 34 minutes ago

Yes I agree. AI has fundamental problems but a lot of "AI sucks" is the huge, trivial capability for misuse.

sreekanth850 28 minutes ago

Many will disagree and say that anything done by humans is by far superior to anything done by machines. You don't want to correct them, do you?

ezlo707 17 minutes ago

Machines are extensions of man, it’s not man vs machine but man with machines vs man without.

Well at least as long as they don’t develop consciousness of their own.

sreekanth850 13 minutes ago

The problem is when people ignore or dismiss developments in AI purely out of insecurity or a sense of human superiority. Machines don’t have to be superior to humans to dramatically amplify what humans can do.

philipallstar 10 minutes ago

Well, it's different "man" as well - lowering the barrier to entry means people with less skill but with a machine, and maybe the gift of the gab, can commercially surpass the previous people, whether or not they have a machine available.

qsera 9 minutes ago

>just as top notch quality as they produced before, just that now they are much faster.

No, they are not. There write programs like they write prose. There is 100% adherence to grammar and spelling when they write prose, but yet what they write is unintelligible and needlessly verbose.

When they write computer programs there is 100% adherence to good practices, but eventually the program becomes so unintelligible and verbose that only an LLM can make any sense of it going forward. But even then, changes result in more things breaking than they fix. But the number of bugs slashed goes through the roof. Management is happy!

>Of course you can misuse it.

I think the proper way to use it is to use it as a better search tool. But I don't think AI marketing and valuation is going to be sated by such a use case.

dude250711 18 minutes ago

Let's go back to caves, this whole "civilisation" thing is not working out.

Leonard_of_Q 12 minutes ago

The trees, man, the trees. We never should have left the trees.

Retro_Dev an hour ago

I'd imagine that OpenAI would try to stagger their announcements, rather than publishing them recently close to each other. Is this because their previous post (about navier stokes problem) was met with controversy?

aurareturn an hour ago

I genuinely think that AI has accelerated so many different things that announcements from all companies will be incredibly common and fast.

In my own company, the last 2 months, I feel like we've made more feature announcements to our internal staff than they can handle. AI has genuinely made us that much faster.

In the past, making one of these announcements every month and the company celebrated. Now we're making making multiple each week.

Not only that, we're making so many tiny improvements and bug fixes that improve the experience but we don't even bother to make those announcements anymore. They don't feel "grand" enough anymore. The goal post has shifted a lot in the last 6 months.

qsera an hour ago

Which company?

crashprone 43 minutes ago

I apologise if this sounds mean spirited, I find posts like these making grand claims without taking the time to present facts that back the magnitude of these claims simply add noise to the discussion.

You could've stopped with just the first sentence and I've would learned just as much as I did reading that comment to the end.

aurareturn 19 minutes ago

I've been tracking Github commits per week for my team. Here's how it's looking:

https://imgur.com/a/GvByYrD

Our own Github commits volume seem to follow quite closely with token usage on Open Router:

https://openrouter.ai/rankings

Retro_Dev 8 minutes ago

Do you also have a graph for more useful metrics, like number of requested features delivered? Commits, lines of code, headscratch count... there are a lot of metrics you can use, but LLMs are notorious for increasing code verbosity - which adds noise to the already imprecise metric you linked.

sznio 21 minutes ago

> more feature announcements to our internal staff than they can handle

have you considered the consequences of that or are you still drunk and thinking that this is a good thing?

ForHackernews an hour ago

They are desperately rushing to IPO before the bubble bursts.

zarzavat 33 minutes ago

AI just solved a millennium prize problem. In a matter of days. Because of a rumor that someone else solved the same problem with AI.

What exactly would AI have to do in order to not be called a bubble?

dgellow 21 minutes ago

You don’t understand what a bubble is. How good the technology is is irrelevant. That has nothing to do with an economical bubble. It’s all about massive capital misallocation driven by a frenzy of FOMO, which is specifically the case for AI investments. Economically speaking what is happening is the most obvious bubble possible, it follows everything that would be expected from a bubble where companies are chasing an ill-defined grandiose dream, based on a new technology we don’t understand and has very dubious ROI, selling some vague future utopia, allocating massive amount of capital to build infrastructure dedicated to a very early versions of that technology.

As things mature there will be a correction, ie the bubble will pop.

I would recommend to read « Boom and Bust: a global history of financial bubbles » https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/boom-and-bust-a-globa...

philipallstar 8 minutes ago

You should see all the misallocation that was put towards valve-based computing. Why didn't they just all arrive at the correct answer without investing in discovery first?

poilcn 15 minutes ago

How these things are even connected?

The current prices the largest players set for their models are not profitable, they bleed money. Eventually they will "fix" it. It could end up making their services less affordable and it could cascade other businesses and services that are dependent on them go out of business

MyMemoryfails 4 minutes ago

Its resource allocation problem, same happened with .com bubble, lots investors put tons of money into dark fibers. Were they useless? No its very useful.

If you want check a example company from the .com days check cisco, their stock peaked at 75 then crashed hard and only managed hit that again thanks for the AI bubble.

alansaber 32 minutes ago

This is just a blogpost, rather than a major announcement (FLT proof was closer to the latter than the former)

Oarch 22 minutes ago

At the rate this field is accelerating maybe this IS staggering