> Current QCs are only good for one thing and one thing only: "Simulating" quantum systems. That's only true of gate-model machines; for example, Google's rece

> Current QCs are only good for one thing and one thing only: "Simulating" quantum systems. That's only true of gate-model machines; for example, Google's recent claims of supremacy seem to boil down to something like that. Premature, to say the least, though the work by their team is nonetheless impressive. The pressure to publish is very real! Investors (even when it's a company-internal effort like Google's) still expect some kind of progress even if ROI is not yet being delivered. Quantum annealers are already solving optimization problems well. One of the goals here is to democratize access to high-quality, high-performance optimization capabilities. > Nobody is solving any actual optimization problems with a QC in any meaningful sense Not quite true. Check out what we did in Lisbon: https://www.dwavesys.com/media-coverage/volkswagen-optimizes-traffic-flow-quantum-computers https://www.dwavesys.com/media-coverage/volkswagen-optimizes... Clearly this is early days; but the way that detractors talk about this effort is perhaps best server through a metaphor. Imagine you were interested in Babbage or Turing's work early on, but your question for them was, "but how will I use this device to get dinner delivered?" It's easy for us with a hundred years of progress to see how a connected world enables those kinds of questions to have very robust answers, but it would have been very difficult to see that when you're standing in front of an Analytical Engine full of inscrutable steampunk complexity. If the applications we enjoy so much on the modern Internet were the actual end goal of the technology, it would have been considered unfit for purpose for a very long time indeed! Intermediate, small-scale applications are what paved the way forward, and so too they will be what enables quantum computing research to continue for the likely decades that it will take before it is integrated into apps that consumers use on a day to day basis. That said, the sort of applications that we talk about around here are often in the realms of science-fiction - imagine the kinds of scheduling and coordination problems that people and machines find difficult today being solved cheaply using open-source software and widely available cloud QPU capabilities. Imagine traffic routing where every single person's destination is calculated together as a tremendous optimization problem in near-realtime to maximize the throughput of a city's streets, or where large-scale resource distribution problems can be solved in maximally equitable ways to help deal with the kinds of challenges we all know are looming on the horizon. > the company you work for has a long history of making grandiose claims The company I work for has a long history of delivering tremendous technological advancements, from fabrication to algorithms to production-grade online systems that anyone can access for free. We haven't let Aaronson's opinion stop us from working on that.