Zapata AI Earns Second DARPA Award for Quantum Benchmarking

Working closely with partners in industry and academia, the Phase II Award will develop open-source tools to estimate the resources required for high-value industrial applications of quantum computing.

Zapata Computing, Inc. (“Zapata AI” or the “Company”), the Industrial Generative AI software company developing solutions and applications to solve enterprises’ hardest problems, today announced that the company, along with several academic and technology partners, has been selected as an awardee for the second phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking program. Zapata AI is a participant in both Technical Area 1 and Technical Area 2 of the program. The multi-year, multi-million-dollar award will help the quantum computing community identify the resources required to deliver quantum applications with high utility for industrial problems.

The Phase II award builds on the Phase I award granted to the same group of collaborators in 2022. Where the Phase I award was focused on building BenchQ — an open-source tool for benchmarking quantum computing applications — and demonstrating its value for resource estimation, the Phase II award will focus on improving the tool to increase community adoption. This includes building and maintaining BenchQ software integrations and broadening the applicability to additional use cases. The work will identify high-value applications, quantify their utility, and estimate the resources required to unlock that utility across multiple quantum hardware modalities.

Zapata AI’s partners on this initiative include the most highly regarded and visionary experts in the field of quantum computing. The collaboration includes teams from:

• Aalto University (Finland)
• IonQ
• University of Technology Sydney (Australia)
• University of Texas at Dallas
• The effort kicked off earlier this month.

Quotes About the News:

“This Phase II award is an important step forward from our work on Phase I that will move the industry closer to delivering practical applications of quantum computing for industrial-scale problems,” said Alexandru Paler, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University. “We’re excited to continue our collaboration and share the tools we’ve developed with the broader quantum computing community.”

"We are proud to be able to continue contributing IonQ's cutting-edge quantum computing architecture and valuable commercial expertise to this important work,” said Jungsang Kim, Chief Technology Officer at IonQ. “This latest DARPA award will help us to better quantify the impact of our quantum hardware across industries and business practices, and assess and improve the timeline to practical commercial advantage.” In addition to the efforts with DARPA, Zapata AI and IonQ also recently announced a new strategic alliance to benchmark Industrial Generative AI techniques on quantum hardware.

“The benchmarking tools we’re developing will shine unprecedented light on the utility of quantum computers and the path to realizing that utility,” said Simon Devitt, Faculty, Center for Quantum Software and Information at University of Technology Sydney. “With this new DARPA award, we aim to give the community a newfound clarity in where we are and where we are going.”

“There has never been a more exciting time to be involved in the quantum computing community” said Joseph S. Friedman, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas. “These tools developed under the DARPA program will unlock new breakthroughs that bring us closer to a future where quantum computers can unlock real value for applications across industries. We are proud to be a part of the team delivering these valuable tools to the community.”

“We are immensely proud to be able to continue our collaboration with the U.S. government and our partners on the DARPA quantum benchmarking project.” said Christopher Savoie, CEO of Zapata AI. “Quantum computing has always been a part of our DNA, and it’s through quantum research like this that we’ve been able to unlock advantages for generative AI that we can deliver for customers today. We expect our collaboration with DARPA and our research partners will continue to unlock breakthroughs that we can eventually commercialize to help enterprise customers solve their hardest problems.”

BenchQ is now available as an open-source tool and can be accessed here.

About Zapata AI

Zapata AI is the Industrial Generative AI company, revolutionizing how enterprises solve their hardest problems with its powerful suite of Generative AI software. By combining numerical and text-based solutions, Zapata AI empowers enterprises to leverage large language models and numerical generative models better, faster, and more efficiently—delivering solutions to drive growth, savings and unprecedented insight. With proprietary science and engineering techniques and the Orquestra® platform, Zapata AI is accelerating Generative AI’s impact in Industry. The Company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. To learn more, visit: https://www.zapata.ai. On September 6, 2023, Zapata AI entered into a definitive business combination agreement with Andretti Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: WNNR), the consummation of which, subject to customary closing conditions, will result in Zapata AI becoming a publicly listed company on the New York Stock Exchange.

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