How GPT‑5.6 Sol helps run quantum computing experiments

Retro_Dev

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?

raverbashing

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

throwaway63467

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.

lompad

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

qsera

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....

Oarch

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

Leonard_of_Q

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.

petesergeant

So new business model meta is: acquire enough compute that you can burn millions of dollars on patentable scientific breakthroughs with unused capacity and on models nobody else has yet. That might actually kind of make sense.

mentalgear

Another one of openAI's stolen 'discoveries' for the IPO warm-up ?

de6u99er

Another glorious random number generator experiment?

dr_dshiv

Guess I need to update https://quantumvibecoding.org

bananaflag

I find it funny to see all these framings as AI "freeing" people from some work so they are able to do some other work. People should be more prepared for the prospect of AI doing any conceivable sort of work, and this sort of formulation lulls them into a false sense of security.

logicallee

Along the same lines, I asked ChatGPT-5.6 Sol to evaluate the feasibility of a neural network running natively on quantum computing, you can see the study here: http://taonexus.com/publicfiles/sep2026/quantum_neural_netwo... In short it's not really feasible and it suggested classical coherent photonics and in-memory compute as more viable approaches. ( Off-topic aside: these days I am more interested in funding Social Security Trust Funds (OASI & DI Solvency) - if anyone at OpenAI can help reactivate my account: rviragh@gmail.com it would let me do further studies that directly support this important goal, currently my chatgpt account was deactivated. I apologize for any mistakes I made earlier, it won't happen again. Please reactivate my account - thank you. )

sidcool

OpenAI is on a quite offensive lately with pathbreaking discoveries.

fHr

Dumbest thing I have ever witnessed was the quantum bullrun end of 24 start of 25 and the surge in stock prices of rgti/qbts/ionq and the absolute usless stuff they have since produced beside pr trash.

Iuz

Every time I open one of the multiple daily posts about Anthropic or OpenAI and read the comments, I get this weird feeling. Astroturfing is obviously common in political spaces, whether to normalize certain views, manufacture consensus, or shift public opinion. It seems to me that HN would be a prime target for tech companies to do the same thing, and lately I can't shake the impression that there's a lot of it going on here. This site might be dying.

varispeed

Is it a version that has not yet been nerfed? Since yesterday I noticed Sol and Astra have become much dumber.

the__alchemist

I am wondering about using ML/AI for quantum chemistry; ORCA is S-tier software and docs, but is very slow!

avazhi

I feel like, given how poorly techies view OAI and its executive team, they'd be better off not releasing PR (ie., IPO-farming) announcements like this. If you've got something objectively monumental to announce then sure I guess (I mean, most of us will just assume OAI is lying/exaggerating), but nobody takes the OAI propaganda seriously. You might even say this is not how you make your first billion.