📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Scientists pull off quantum teleportation between ph

Researchers in Germany have taken a major step toward a practical quantum internet. A team at the University of Stuttgart has demonstrated the first transfer of quantum information between photons emitted by two different quantum dots.

The advance tackles one of the hardest obstacles in building quantum repeaters, the devices needed to extend quantum communication across long fiber networks.

Quantum communication relies on single photons whose polarization carries zero or one. Any attempt to read or intercept that state leaves traces, making the system inherently secure.

Photons weaken in optical fibers, and unlike classical light, quantum information cannot be copied or amplified.

Quantum repeaters aim to renew that information using teleportation, but the process demands nearly identical photons from different sources.

The Stuttgart team addressed this challenge with nanometer-scale semiconductor islands. These quantum dots generate single photons with specific properties.

“For the first time worldwide, we have succeeded in transferring quantum information among photons originating from two different quantum dots,” says Prof. Peter Michler.

The team partnered with the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden, which built nearly identical quantum dots. Tim Strobel, first author of the study, says, “Light quanta from different quantum dots have never been teleported before because it is so challenging.”

He adds that the fixed energy levels inside the quantum dots allow researchers to generate well-defined photons on demand.

“Our partners at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden have developed quantum dots that differ only minimally,” he says.

Teleportation across two quantum dots

To demonstrate teleportation, one quantum dot produced a single photon while the other produced an entangled photon pair.

One photon from the pair traveled through a 10-meter optical fiber and interfered with the single photon.

Their overlap transferred the polarization state to the distant partner photon.

Quantum frequency converters from Saarland University corrected remaining frequency differences to keep the photons indistinguishable.

“Transferring quantum information between photons from different quantum dots is a crucial step toward bridging greater distances,” Michler says.

Earlier experiments from the same group kept entanglement intact through a 36-kilometer fiber run across Stuttgart, proving that long-range deployment is possible.

The current setup teleports information with a success rate slightly over 70 percent. Strobel says the team wants to improve this by stabilizing the quantum dots.

“We want to reduce this by advancing semiconductor fabrication techniques,” he says.

Toward real-world quantum networks

The work forms part of the Quantenrepeater.Net project funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space.

The consortium includes 42 partners working to develop quantum repeaters that fit into existing fiber networks.

Dr. Simone Luca Portalupi calls the latest result a milestone. “Achieving this experiment has been a long-standing ambition — these results reflect years of scientific dedication and progress,” she says.

“It’s exciting to see how experiments focused on fundamental research are taking their first steps toward practical applications.”

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: How AI tax startup Blue J torched its entire business

In the winter of 2022, as the tech world was becoming mesmerized by the sudden, explosive arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Benjamin Alarie faced a pivotal choice. His legal tech startup, Blue J, had a respectable business built on the AI of a bygone era, serving hundreds of law firms with predictive models. But it had hit a ceiling.

Alarie, a tenured tax law professor at the University of Toronto, saw the nascent, error-prone, yet powerful capabilities of large language models not as a curiosity, but as the future. He made a high-stakes decision: to pivot his entire company, which had been painstakingly built over nearly a decade, and rebuild it from the ground up on this unproven technology.

That bet has paid off handsomely. Blue J has since quietly secured a $122 million Series D funding round co-led by Oak HC/FT and Sapphire Ventures, placing the company's valuation at over $300 million. The move transformed Blue J from a niche player into one of Canada's fastest-growing legal tech firms, multiplying its revenue roughly twelve-fold and attracting 10 to 15 new customers every day.

The company now serves more than 3,500 organizations, including global accounting giant KPMG UK and several Fortune 500 companies. It is tackling a critical bottleneck in the professional services industry: a severe and worsening talent shortage. The U.S. has 340,000 fewer accountants than it did five years ago, and with 75% of current CPAs expected to retire in the next decade, firms are desperate for tools that can amplify the productivity of their remaining experts.

“What once took tax professionals 15 hours of manual research to do can now be completed in about 15 seconds with Blue J,” Alarie, the company's CEO, said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "That value proposition—we can take hours of work and turn it into seconds of work—that is driving a lot of this."

When the dean's biography was wrong: the moment that changed everything

Alarie vividly remembers January 2023, when the dean of the law school stopped by his office for New Year's greetings. He asked her about ChatGPT and prompted the AI to describe her. ChatGPT confidently generated a biography. Some details were accurate. Others were completely fabricated.

"She was like, 'Okay, this is really kind of scary. This is wrong, and this has implications,'" Alarie said. Yet that moment of obvious failure didn't deter him. Instead, it crystallized his conviction.

The company's first iteration, launched in 2015, used supervised machine learning to build predictive models that could forecast judicial outcomes on specific tax issues. While technically sophisticated, it had a fundamental flaw: it couldn't answer every tax research question.

"The challenge was it couldn't answer every tax research question, which was really the holy grail," Alarie said. Customers loved the tool when it applied to their problem, but would quickly abandon it when it didn't. Revenue plateaued around $2 million annually.

Despite ChatGPT's notorious hallucinations, Alarie convinced his board to make the pivot. "I had this conviction that if we continued down that path, we weren't going to be able to address our number one limitation," he said. "Large language models seemed like a very promising direction."

He gave his team six months to deliver a working product.

From 90-second responses to 3 million queries: How Blue J tamed AI hallucinations

By August 2023, Blue J was ready to launch. What they released was, in Alarie's candid assessment, "super janky." The system took 90 seconds to respond. About half the answers had issues. The Net Promoter Score registered at just 20.

What transformed that flawed product into today's platform — with response times measured in seconds, a dissatisfaction rate of just one in 700 queries, and an NPS score in the mid-80s — was relentless focus on three strategic pillars.

First is proprietary content at massive scale. Blue J secured exclusive licensing with Tax Analysts (Tax Notes) and IBFD, the Amsterdam-based global tax authority covering 220+ jurisdictions. "We are the only platform on earth that takes in the best U.S. tax information from Tax Notes and the best global tax information from IBFD," Alarie said.

Second is deep human expertise. Blue J employs tax experts led by Susan Massey, who spent 13 years at the IRS Office of Chief Counsel as Branch Chief for Corporate Tax. Her team constantly tests the AI and refines its performance.

Third is an unprecedented feedback flywheel. With over 3 million tax research queries processed in 2025, Blue J is amassing unparalleled data. Each query generates feedback that flows back into the system.

Weekly active user rates hover between 75% and 85%, compared to 15% to 25% for traditional platforms. "A charitable ratio is like we're five times more intensively used," Alarie noted.

Inside Blue J's early access partnership with OpenAI

Blue J maintains an unusually close relationship with OpenAI that has proven crucial to its success. "We have a very good relationship with OpenAI, and we get early access to their models,"Alarie said. "It's quite collaborative. We give them a lot of really high quality feedback about how well different versions of forthcoming models are performing."

This feedback proves valuable because Blue J has developed what Alarie calls "ecologically valid" test questions — drawn from actual tax professional queries, with correct answers determined by Blue J's expert team. This helps OpenAI improve performance on complex reasoning tasks.

The company tests models from all major providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, <a href="https://gemini.google.co…

Konten dipersingkat otomatis.

🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com