Quantum computing may someday be amazing, but at the current rate of progress, in 5 years it'll still probably be a side show. There's a small-but-reasonable ch

Quantum computing may someday be amazing, but at the current rate of progress, in 5 years it'll still probably be a side show. There's a small-but-reasonable chance of some sort of massive breakthrough that will make them suddenly jump in power, but I wouldn't call it a good bet from a financial perspective. (Bear in mind, for instance, that while Google may have demonstrated a 53-qubit machine, it's still deeply limited and they had to construct a problem for it to demonstrate quantum supremacy on. It isn't even an arbitrary 53-qubit machine yet.) At the moment, I see no clear path towards monetization for these startups yet, in any time scale that makes sense for a startup. AIUI it's not like there's even a ton of algorithms that you'd want to run on a quantum computer yet that are known to be clear quantum wins. For instance, breaking encryption requires a qubit per bit of encryption, IIRC; it's not just that "quantum computers break encryption" but "4096-arbitrary-qubit computers break 4096-bit encryption". 4096-qubit machines seem a long shot on the 5-year time frame, even interpreting current progress as exponential, let alone a 4096-qubit machine that can actually run Shor's algorithm.