MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

Quantum plays the long game, but don’t blink... you might miss it 😉 We joined the first-ever Business of Quantum Summit hosted by MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, an event aiming to cut through the hype and get concrete on quantum computing’s business impact. ⚛️🤝 Alice & Bob’s US General Manager Juliette Peyronnet took the stage alongside Google, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and others to discuss real-world applications of quantum, and what needs to happen to get there. 🔑 Here's what we took away: 🔹 Quantum computing won't replace classical computing. 🖥️ But for certain problems, it will massively outperform it. Think of classical computing as a race car, and quantum as a dirt bike. The dirt bike is slower, but when the road doesn't exist or the route is rough, the dirt bike can cut through the terrain to get to the destination faster. 🔹 FTQC is the way to near-term value. 👣 And error correction is no longer a dream. Panelists highlighted big progress on this front - Google’s logical qubit with Willow, and Alice & Bob's record on bit-flips suppression. ⚡ 🔹 100 logical qubits is an inflection point. 🔬 MIT believes that this will be the threshold where quantum could accelerate scientific research. 🧪 📊 MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy dropped a preview of their Quantum Index Report, and we’re in it. For a break down of current quantum technologies and performance, take a look 👉https://lnkd.in/errVrEwA Thank you to organizers Neil Thompson and Jonathan Ruane, MIT researchers Johannes Galatsanos and Jayson Lynch, our panel moderator Michael Cusumano, and to other panelists: Yudong Cao, Elizabeth Rossi, Olivier Ezratty. #MIT #BusinessOfQuantumSummit #QuantumComputing #FTQC #ErrorCorrection Photo credits: Giro Studio

Search is (currently) the surface on which AI will affect human decision making at the greatest scale. But, we know AI Search hallucinates, as Google’s AI Search has advised users to “eat rocks," glue cheese to pizza, and that “doctors recommend smoking 2-3 cigarettes per day during pregnancy.” So, we ran 12,000 search queries across 7 countries, generating 80,000 real-time GenAI and traditional search results, to understand current global exposure to GenAI search. We then used a preregistered, randomized experiment on a large study sample to understand when humans trust AI Search. The results were surprising and a bit unnerving... 🚩 First, our study shows that GenAI search results are globally pervasive but vary greatly by topic. Over half of all Health (51%) and General Knowledge (56%) queries returned AI results while only 5% of Shopping and 1% of Covid queries returned AI results. The pervasiveness of AI in search results suggests we should be concerned with the conditions under which humans trust AI search. 🤔 🚩 Second, the format of the query predicts whether you get AI or traditional search results with questions returning GenAI answers 49% of the time, statements 16% of the time and navigational searches returning GenAI only 4% of the time. 🚩 Third, in the RCT, while participants trust GenAI search less than traditional search on average, reference links and citations significantly increase trust in GenAI, even when those links and citations are incorrect or hallucinated. In other words, the veneer of rigor in AI design creates trust even when references and links are not rigorous. 🤯 🚩 Uncertainty highlighting, which reveals GenAI’s confidence in its own conclusions, makes us less willing to trust and share generative information whether that confidence is high or low. 🚩 Positive social feedback increases trust in GenAI while negative feedback reduces trust. These results imply that GenAI interface designs can increase trust in inaccurate and hallucinated information and reduce trust when GenAI’s certainty is made explicit. 🚩 Trust in GenAI varies by topic and with users’ education, industry employment and GenAI experience, revealing which sub-populations are most vulnerable to GenAI misrepresentations. 🚩 Trust then predicts behavior as those who trust GenAI more click more and spend less time evaluating GenAI search results. These findings suggest directions for GenAI design to address the AI "trust gap.” The paper, coauthored with Haiwen Li, is linked in the first comment. We thank the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy for support and are grateful to SerpApi for assistance with query scaling. As always, thoughts and comments highly encouraged! Wondering especially what Erik Brynjolfsson Edward McFowland III Iavor Bojinov John Horton Karim Lakhani Azeem Azhar Sendhil Mullainathan Nicole Immorlica Alessandro Acquisti Ethan Mollick Katy Milkman and others think!

📢 In our April 2025 update we added 9 new frameworks, ~600 new risks, and one new subdomain (multi-agent risks) to the MIT AI Risk Repository. The full list of new frameworks is below: 1- International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Yoshua Bengio and many others) 2- A collaborative, human-centred taxonomy of AI, algorithmic, and automation harms (Gavin Abercrombie, Delaram Golpayegani and others) 3 - Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI (Lewis Hammond and many others) 4- A taxonomy of systemic risks from general-purpose AI (Risto Uuk and others) 5- AI Risk Atlas (Frank Bagehorn, Elizabeth Daly and others) 6- Generative AI misuse: A taxonomy of tactics and insights from real-world data (Nahema Marchal, PhD and others) 7- Risk sources and risk management measures in support of standards for general-purpose AI systems (Rokas Gipiškis, Koen Holtman and others) 8- AI Hazard Management: A framework for the systematic management of root causes for AI risks (Ronald Schnitzer, Andreas Hapfelmeier, Sven Gaube, and others) 9- AILUMINATE: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommons (Peter Mattson, MLCommons and many others) Read the attached for more information about the frameworks (including links to the papers) and the process we used. Visit our website to access the updated database. Please use the feedback form in the comment to suggest new research to consider for future updates. Thanks to Jess Graham and Alexander Saeri for doing most of the work here. Tagging a few people who this update may be of interest to: Kevin Fumai Ravit Dotan, PhD Yonah Welker Sam Burrett Chris Kraft Jakub Szarmach, AIGP, CIPM, Rafah Knight Bugge Holm Hansen Abhivardhan ㅤ.Tony Moroney Nafis Alam Elena Gurevich Luiza Jarovsky Katharina Koerner Jonas Schuett Kevin Klyman Oliver Patel, AIGP, CIPP/E Raymond Sun Samuel Salzer Phil Venables

In early days of Integrated Circuits, engineering were focused on optimizing factors such as cost, space, heat dissipation. We find ourselves in a similar phase with quantum computing. Science as well as market competition are edging us toward a dominant design. Business leaders shouldn't just watch, but participate! It gives me great pleasure to share the Quantum Index Report, produced in collaboration with MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Many thanks to the team: Jonathan Ruane, Dr. Elif Kiesow, Johannes Galatsanos, Carl Dukatz, and Edward Blomquist; and support from Albert Scerbo and David Verrill. Francis Hintermann, H. James Wilson, Pradeep Roy #accenture #accentureresearch #mitide #accenturetechnology #quantumcomputing

Happy to share an article, “How to Structure a B2B Marketplace Venture” in MIT Sloan Management Review. We explore the various ownership structures of business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces and the implications of each model (internal, corporate spinout, pure startup). Key factors influencing the choice of structure include market fragmentation, potential regulatory issues, and the importance of partnerships or external funding. This article comes from work at MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy with colleagues Didier Bonnet, Georgios Petropoulos, and Leonardo Serra.  #B2B #Marketplaces #BusinessStrategy #Entrepreneurship #Platform #Transformation Article available here: https://lnkd.in/eE6FidzH

To celebrate #WorldQuantumDay, we are thrilled to release the first chapter in the 2025 Quantum Index Report. This chapter focuses on QPU Benchmarking, a challenging but important task. Access it here: https://lnkd.in/errVrEwA The Quantum Index Report is designed to provide independent, data-driven insights into the rapidly evolving fields of quantum computing and quantum networking. We take a community-led approach to tracking progress across a wide range of benchmarks, highlighting key milestones, and helping both experts and newcomers understand the implications of these critical technologies. We look forward to releasing the full report in the coming weeks and invite you to research out and contribute in any way you can. Many thanks to everyone involved especially the QIR research team including Johannes Galatsanos and Dr. Elif Kiesow from MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and Center for Quantum Networks as well as Carl Dukatz, Prashant P. Shukla, PhD, Edward Blomquist from Accenture Research and Shawneric Hachey. Additional thanks to: MIT Sloan School of Management National Science Foundation (NSF)

I'm very excited to announce that we published the first part of the 2024-2025 MIT Quantum Index Report, punctually for the World Quantum Day in the UN Year of Quantum 2025! I'm particularly proud as this is the chapter I've been working on through my appointment at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and the Center for Quantum Networks, and is building on my MIT Thesis on Quantum Benchmarking. If you are curious about the state of Quantum Computing, and would like to get a more objective view on where the technology is today, this is the report for you! If you're an expert in QC, I'm sure you will find some surprising results too on the current state and the future of quantum computing. I would love to hear your thoughts! Next to my amazing co-authors Jonathan Ruane, Dr. Elif Kiesow, Carl Dukatz, and Edward Blomquist, I also want to thank all collaborators of the QIR: Olivier Ezratty, Elica (Elitsa) Kyoseva, Sylwia Barthel de Weydenthal (she/her), The Quantum Insider, and all who contributed with providing their QPU metrics: Juliette Peyronnet Michelle Maggs Patrick McNally Gopal Karemore Julian Kelly Rebecca Malamud Thomas Noel James Clarke Andrea de Souza Abbie-Rose Curbison Rossy Nhung Nguyen Michelle Lampa Lac Nguyen Marta P Estarellas Jana Lehner. Lastly I want to note that, as the underlying data was manually and painstakingly composed, I would like to invite all Quantum Computing Manufacturers to collaborate on updating and maintaining this list going forward. Please reach out to me or the authoring team to make this crucial data available to the quantum community! https://lnkd.in/eY_FyZAc #WorldQuantumDay #wqd #quantum #quantumcomputing #qpu Will Oliver Frédéric Barbaresco Blaise Vignon Sara Dolcetti Michael Baczyk Gabriela Cimpan Subham K. Brendan Karch Victor Rygaard Ostenfeld Torben Orla Nielsen Subham K. Michael Cusumano Brian Martin Zoran Krunic Thomas Ehmer Morten Bache

🚀 We’re excited to share the release of Chapter 10 of the #MIT Quantum Index Report (QIR), the first of its kind focused on Quantum Computing Processor Benchmarking, one of the most pressing topics in the field today. Unveiled during the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy's Business of Quantum Summit, the QIR is a new initiative offering independent, data-driven insights into #quantumcomputing and networking. Designed to bring transparency, accessibility, and strategic clarity to the #quantum ecosystem, the report serves scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and more. The release comes just in time for #WorldQuantumDay, a global celebration of #quantumscience and its transformative potential. There’s no better moment to highlight the importance of community-led, open-access resources like this. 👉 Access Chapter 10: https://lnkd.in/errVrEwA Stay tuned for the full report coming soon. Thank you to the team who put this report together: Jonathan Ruane, Dr. Elif Kiesow, Johannes Galatsanos and Carl Dukatz, Edward Blomquist and Prashant P. Shukla, PhD from Accenture for their continued support and contributions.

Today is #WorldQuantumDay, and we’re reflecting on two big questions that defined our recent Business of Quantum Summit at MIT: 1️⃣ What is #quantumcomputing best suited for? 2️⃣ When will the technology be ready for real-world business use? These questions and their complex, evolving answers, shaped every conversation at the event, hosted by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. With leaders from companies like Google, Accenture, Microsoft Research, BCG X, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we explored the promise and the reality of #quantum tech today. Highlights include: – A demo of MIT FutureTech's Quantum Economic Advantage Calculator – Candid insights on quantum networking, error correction & cryptography – The launch of the Quantum Index Report tracking industry signals Read the full recap blog by Peter Krass here: https://lnkd.in/etW9DJMR . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Ruane, Neil Thompson, Jayson Lynch, Johannes Galatsanos, Dr. Elif Kiesow

We are thrilled to be joined by Tom Cunningham, from OpenAI for next week's MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy lunch seminar on April 16. Tom's talk "Stylized facts about AI capabilities" will explore key insights from #OpenAI's experiences with frontier #AI models, identify critical capabilities that could unlock greater #economic impact, and discuss how AI’s effects can be modeled in general equilibrium. Be sure to register as space is limited! In-person registration: https://lnkd.in/e7xhZ8wX Virtual registration: https://lnkd.in/eZJTzriA