Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

Definitely not a quantum expert, but I have a feeling that news like this have been happening for more than a decade, without anything usable.

It's what happens when companies are driven by profit rather than making accurate scientific statements that reputation is built by and further research funding is predicated on.

Hyperbolic claims like this are for shareholders who aren't qualified to judge for themselves because they're interested in future money and not actual understanding. This is what happens when you delegate science to corporations.

Yeah but let’s be honest they aren’t going to be profiting off this. So maybe to help them feel they are contributing to a good cause

It's great funding for physics research. I don't care if it's useless, it beats spending on politics and surveillance

There's also the fact that the road to useful is littered with useless, because how else would you make progress?

I’m no expert either, so I hope one can corroborate or correct me…

My understanding though is that these steps are really the very beginning. Using a quantum computer with quantum algorithms to prove that it’s possible.

Once proven (which maybe article this is claiming?) the next step is actually creating a computer with enough qubits and entanglable pairs and low enough error rates that it can be used to solve larger problems at scale.

Because my current understanding with claims like these is that they are likely true, but in the tiny.

It’d be like saying “I have a new algorithm for factoring primes that is 10000x faster than the current best, but can only factor numbers up to 103.”

You could do what evolution does, and require that every version be useful. But evolution seems to require an awful lot of trial and error.

Evolution requiring that every version is useful seems a (significant) oversimplification.

If some version is not reasonably useful, it doesn't have kids.