Unitary Fund 2022 Annual Report

To the Unitary Fund community,

Technology often surprises us with its pace of development. Like many of you, I have been fascinated by recent releases in machine learning. Language and vision models like GPT-4, Claude, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion have debuted impressive features that have many updating their estimates for how soon Artificial General Intelligence may be developed. How has this happened?

Firstly, these results rely on long term investments in computing hardware. From CPUs to GPUs, TPUs, Apple Silicon and other new processors, the decades of hardware development that has led to today’s cloud computing resources have made these leaps possible. The seeds that we are now planting in quantum technologies across computing, networks and sensing will similarly grow over decades and form the foundation of new advances to come.

Secondly, the dominance of open source toolkits and communities has both accelerated machine learning and, so far, made those developments relatively accessible to researchers and companies across the world. It is an active and important conversation about what direction the future of AI will take, but there have been many benefits to how open it has been thus far. Similarly, our mission at Unitary Fund is to ensure that a thriving open ecosystem for quantum technologies can help them develop faster and to the benefit of more people.

The investments we make now in the open quantum technology ecosystem have a huge impact on our future.

We’ve driven this mission further last year,

launching Metriq, the open community-driven platform to host and share quantum technology benchmarks
growing Mitiq, the first open-source toolkit for quantum error mitigation to over 70,000 downloads and 50 code contributors
running unitaryHACK, with awarded bounties to over 63 merged pull requests across 30 projects with the help of 45 maintainers and hundreds of “quantum hackers”
building and launching the Quantum Open Source Software Survey and collected over 1000 responses.
awarding 14 grants to amazing projects, spanning from the first Rust projects supported by UF to an outreach program for highschool students.

And much more that you will read about in the full 2022 annual report.

We are so grateful to our supporters, advisors, grants winners, open source contributors, hackathon participants and others who have all come together to form the growing Unitary Fund community. Thanks to all of you who have joined us in this mission. We are just getting started,

William Zeng

President, Unitary Fund