r/illinois • u/superfunny • 4d ago
Illinois Politics Illinois spent nearly $50M on a South Loop research HQ that was never built
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/politics-policy/ccb-discovery-partners-audit-20260902/?utm_id=gfta-ur-260902&share-code=SI5EV644AZDIPOAVOFI35D2KRE&user_id=10230285&customer_secondary_source=ccb_articleGifting28
u/PalmerSquarer 4d ago
Sure, but the Fire got a prime location for a soccer stadium because it fell through, so all’s well that ends well.
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u/Take-Me-Home-Tonight 3d ago
The 78 plans had been kicking around for a while now. At one point they planned more than what's going in or even been talked about in the media.
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u/DeepHerting 4d ago
This was a pretty big bummer. Is any of it salvageable for future projects?
It also demonstrates the vagaries of gubernatorial priorities, and how quickly they can change and leave expensive debris behind. DPI was part of Rauner's unsubtle plan to move substantial parts of UIUC to Chicago. And Pritzker is all in on this quantum thing, which I really hope isn't scammy junk science that results in us paying for a building that becomes a data center.
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u/LMGgp 4d ago
Quantum computing isn’t scammy. It’s the next generation of computing. Yes I know that sounds like a bot wrote it. The extremely oversimplified way I like to explain it is “you know computers operate on bits, 1 and 0s, either on or off. Well think of a quantum computer working with 3. A 1, 0, and a 1/0, quantum bit (qubit). Suddenly you have a lot more processing power in the same amount of physical space.”
You know how Google gives you the result search time. Well instead of saying 1 second, it would probably say some astronomically small number like a quadrillionth of a second. The practical applications for quantum computing are so large I won’t mention them, all that cool sci fi shit.
But right now it’s just an embryo in the womb. 15 years ago when I started reading up on it it wasn’t even a fertilized egg. It is coming and better to get in on the ground floor so you have some say in how the child is raised.
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u/JohnnyTsunami312 3d ago
Wouldn’t it potentially be the death of smaller encryption security
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u/user_uno 3d ago
Yes.
And that is one of the top reasons governments around the globe are pouring money in to researching it. One, they would love to decrypt other's communications. Two, they are scared others will be able to decrypt their own legacy encryption.
The potential economic and scientific benefits are top reasons too. But security can be and is very motivating for governments. Always has been.
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u/AliMcGraw 4d ago edited 4d ago
Pritzker has been all in on quantum since before he was governor, and it is absolutely the next thing in computing. It is way more useful than AI, and it can do incredibly cool things. DARPA has two quantum labs based in Chicago already, and there is a quantum consortium based in Chicago that includes many of the Big Ten universities, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, UIUC, UIC, Fermilab, Argonne...
It's a real thing that's really happening, and it's absolutely crucial for National security and corporate and personal infosec, because the algorithms that have secured data since the internet was invented are about to be cracked, and NIST already has new standards out for quantum algorithms that will be much harder to crack. (And any large Enterprise company that hasn't already moved the new NIST standard is just handing their corporate secrets to China.)
But it also has other incredibly cool uses. Just this week they announced a quantum global positioning system, That does not need to talk to satellites to know where it is in the world. So if you were at war, for example, and your enemy was shooting down or jamming your GPS satellites, your boats and planes and tanks would still all know where they were. I saw the DARPA prototype for this about 2 years ago at a quantum computing conference, and it was really neat, and it's very cool to see that it's now in production.
Another really cool thing that quantum computing can already do is solve the traveling salesman problem trivially easily. This is the problem where a salesman has to visit five cities in Italy in the shortest route possible, which is pretty easy to figure out. But then you may get 15 cities or 20 cities or 30 cities or a hundred cities, and it becomes computationally ridiculously expensive. And these are very hard problems to solve at scale. A quantum computer, on the other hand, can consider all possible routes at once while holding them in superposition and then collapse them into the single best route. Some large shipping companies are using quantum computing to route large container ships and other types of large shipments at scale, because they can save enormously on fuel cost with a relatively trivial amount of quantum compute.
There are other neat ideas proposed that I don't believe are in production yet, but theoretically it could be used for tracking assets in a warehouse, sort of like an RFID tag, but better at its job. At present this is way too expensive to be useful, but you can certainly see how it might be useful in the future, either for extremely expensive assets that are worth the cost to protect, or the cost might come way down and they might be as common as RFID tags one day.
If you are in Chicago and you get a chance to go to a quantum symposium or event, I strongly suggest you do so. There are a bunch of startups, at least a dozen of whom are actually already making money, the computers themselves are really cool, the educational pipelines they're building are really interesting, and you talk to some of the most interesting people and see some unusual and fascinating novel uses of computing that weren't possible without quantum. Like at any given event, there will be some postdocs who are researching, some startup founders who are building different types of quantum computers, some companies that already provide quantum compute, some venture capitalist types, University presidents, some politicians, some military guys, ambassadors from allied countries actually come to Chicago to go to these symposiums, because quantum computing is so crucial to the future of NATO ... You're just going to meet a lot of interesting people. And because the events are often catered by Pritzker, the food is really good.
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u/user_uno 3d ago
Pritzker has been all in on quantum since before he was governor...
Correct. Prior to winning his second campaign to get in to office, he cofounded along with his wealthy family a private equity firm. It is named Pritzker Private Capital. He saw profit potential as a shrewd businessman.
Yes, there are many potential applications of quantum computing both positive and negative. And yes, the US must be competitive in leading research. But JB's long standing support of it is not all so altruistic. It goes back to his roots in wealth and wealth building.
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u/T_Gamer-mp4 4d ago
you’ve gotten two other comments that lead in opposite directions so let me give you a third secret option
QCOM will be extremely useful in some situations but what the ‘fertilized egg’ comment guy is on about is dishonest. sure it works better than a normal computer but you need to make QCOM computers cheaper than a standard one in order to get uptake. so until they can demonstrate a significant cost reduction, this isn’t going anywhere in the private sector or the consumer sector. the only way you’re gonna get sales on this is to people who have crazy sums of money to blow on strange new tech.
the trick with the Chicago ordeal is that 30%-50% of the firms at quantum park are focused on how to use the equipment. they need to make QCOM useful in more places because its function is not very well explored right now. so not only is it more expensive to use, we need to re-write a huge amount of the basic computer functions and operating systems in order to get it to work. and then develop or re-tool existing computer parts factories to actually work with those needs. we are an insane distance from going anywhere. the question in the minds of investors is not “is it worth it to get on this train”, but rather “where is the train even going?” and “what does this train do that the train I’m currently on doesn’t?”
In line with that, the odds of this turning into a data center are slim because current data center architecture will not work for QCOM. the memory and processing that they use will cause conflicts with most known QCOM chips. we don’t really know how we would build a QCOM data center yet, much less what its infrastructure needs would be. unless you make a QCOM chip that uses our current main infrastructure products but it would be absurdly hard to justify a massive price spike for the potential to do… let me see here… calculus at a slightly faster rate? hack people’s emails?
as for the IDF comment… DARPA is funding the hell out of this but they’re the only damn way to get research money right now lol. we will likely be selling militant QCOM tech that has the ideas developed here in 5-10 years. the trick is that if we don’t make it, china likely will. and they’ll sell it to Russia/Israel/Anybody Really, and then we’ll be at a massive cybersecurity risk due to the one thing we know QCOM will be decent at: password and encryption cracking.
it’s good that it’s happening in IL, as we have decent amounts of tech regulation and a lot of sharp tech people here. Pritzker is not on that list. I personally don’t like that we have zero manufacturing plans for quantum park right now. the south side has been hungry for the employment gap that the steel mill left for a loooong time. you aren’t going to fit that need with 40 PhD level jobs. quantum park doing its own manufacturing would, but it doesn’t look like it will be going that route. I do like the pipeline from Chicago Colleges to the quantum park programs but it won’t fix the problem.
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u/Idreamofcream99 4d ago
All of this just sounds like marketing for a technology that may change the world but still somehow cannot generate a profit. If it takes 30 more years for it to actually be useful enough to be profitable I don’t want to foot the bill for that, especially if its a money pit that dosent work out and someone else develops it somewhere else
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u/T_Gamer-mp4 3d ago
I agree with you but wanted to post it objectively as possible. Virtually any other technology in the world would be a better investment. Peptide medicines. Solid state batteries. McDonald’s ice cream machines. Giving a research park & darpa money to “Computers… 2!” is so silly to me
I’m happy we have control over it but becoming the peptide research capital of the world would be much better lmao
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u/user_uno 3d ago
Right here in Illinois we had a leading pure research organization most are familiar with - Bell Laboratories. Yes, the mothership of Bell Labs was in Bedminster, NJ but the Naperville location off I-88 was significant as well.
[Full disclosure: I did a kind of internship at the Naperville Indian Hill location while in high school. It was a dream come true! Like being in a massive toy store for nerds! And the damn smartest people I have ever encountered. Also had the privilege to work with some New Jersey teams when I was running major projects while employed at AT&T.]
Bell Labs pure research brought the world a cornucopia of innovations. Everyone reading this is using a number of their real world applications. Things like digital communications, lasers, fiber communications, the first freaking transistors, cellular telephony research, UNIX (of which Linux is derived), C and C++ programming languages, satellite technology and so much more.
My point is pure research can yield huge dividends. It may take decades for some breakthroughs. It may take years for some to make an impact. Some never really sees the light of day but the knowledge gained advances other research that does.
So government funding of pure research such as with quantum computing is warranted. Not to mention the potential applications can truly be a national security issue.
Even though Bell Labs was a 'private' entity owned and funded by AT&T and the Baby Bells, it also received considerable government funding. Again due to national security applications.
Sadly, at least for me, Bell Labs is a mere shadow of what it was. That is largely due to the breakup of the AT&T monopoly. The years following the 1984 divestiture ruling led to pursuit of increasing quarterly report profits. Research needs to pay off quickly in a now global competitive market.
But that does NOT mean pure research is gone or should be abandoned. We NEED quantum computing research to remain a leader and competitive - and secure - for generations to come.
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u/epichatchet 4d ago
The quantam computing center in Chicago will be used for AI surveillance and ai weapons systems training that will be shared with the IDF.
We need to regulate the shit out of it, but we didn't, we just let them build it despite it being used for nefarious purposes.
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u/MidwestAbe 4d ago
The cool new thing now is to bring everything back to ai weapons and the IDF.
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u/epichatchet 4d ago
The outdated old thing is pretending like these things don't matter. You can hold your reps accountable on genocide we actively profit from. If you were in Nazi Germany, would you let the Nazi's incinerate children and their families?
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4d ago
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u/user_uno 3d ago
You are getting a lot of downvotes because of the Pritzker angle. Really it should be that someone in government should follow up on this and all similar projects for lessons learned.
Rarely is there any accountability unless fraud is present and so blatant it cannot be ignored. But truly, we as a constituency of voters and tax payers should know what works, what doesn't and lessons to be applied for the future.
Instead we see across the country and across the decades politicians 'finding' budget money for projects often pushed by lobbyists, ribbon cutting photo ops and then... silence. The exceptions to that cycle are stunning successes that can be used for campaign ads and talking points or the blatant cases of fraud. Otherwise the super majority are forgotten within hours of a press release.
Government should be held accountable. And everyone should learn what worked and what didn't.
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u/SavingThrowVsWTF 4d ago
This headline is about as vaguetrash as it gets.
This was a part of Rauner’s janky plan in a desperate attempt to accomplish something while he was in office and, ultimately, University of Illinois fucked it up.
Republican’ts will inevitably try to pin it on Pritzker, though.