Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC), the 2014-founded UK startup, says it has built “meaning-aware” natural language processing on a quantum computer. The system understands both grammatical structure and the meaning of words, in a way that classical computers cannot.
“This is quantum native, it cannot be done with a classical computer with a reasonable amount for resources,” says Ilyas Khan, chief executive and founder of CQC, in an interview with Sifted.
Natural language processing is generally done on the basis of recognising patterns in a “bag of words”. Even Open AI’s GPT-3, which can produce very human-sounding text, is based on modelling the relationships between words, like a very very sophisticated autocorrect.
The exponentially-larger quantum state means natural language processing on a quantum computer can code complex linguistic structures and novel models of meaning in quantum circuits.