I was pretty excited about the potential for better quantum simulations (and still am) but interestingly enough, at least in specific areas like protein folding

I was pretty excited about the potential for better quantum simulations (and still am) but interestingly enough, at least in specific areas like protein folding, transformers and LLMs and all have made such huge leaps over the past few years that the bars gotten higher for quantum computers, at least in protein engineering. Plus probably some waning in interest when you go from "man it would be great if quantum computers solved this" to "oh wow these AI models can approximate solutions to a lot of the cases I care about I should focus on that now." Obviously having an analytic solution to a protein structure would be awesome but when protein design tools are approaching double digit success percentages (depends on the protein) in creating designs that work in the lab - that's a lot more compelling than waiting for IBM! Quantum is still cool though and people should do it since we'll outgrow classical computing for this stuff soon enough (what if two proteins?)