Quantum computing hype is bad for science
I take issue with one part of this. Disclaimer, I work for D-Wave....<p>&gt; It is unclear how exactly one can verify that a &quot;quantum code&quot; actually runs on a quantum computer (instead of a classical node inserted between the cloud and the QC provider), and there is a huge window for fraud there.<p>I would like to know what the article&#x27;s author would take as proof of this. All I can offer presently is my personal assurance as a team member helping to keep D-Wave Leap running. Every day, I work with a team of talented scientists, engineers, devops, and developers to help ensure everything from pipeline performance to monitoring cryogenics, and if there&#x27;s one thing that I am certain of, it&#x27;s that our end user submissions run on real hardware at a few millikelvin about absolute zero.<p>I am certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are using quantum effects to achieve low-energy solutions to difficult problems using annealing. I&#x27;m also certain that we&#x27;re making huge progress; from our massive lead in terms of raw qubit count (5000+) to our work making each of those qubits connect to more and more of their neighbours with less noise over time. There are exciting things coming....<p>If other companies are getting away with anything less and promising they&#x27;re doing real-time quantum computing in the cloud, (1) it would be a huge surprise, and (2) their lives must be a lot cushier than ours, because it is a lot of work keeping something like this running. You want to talk about the woes of having to manage on-prem and hybrid cloud workloads, well, does your datacenter have plumbing for liquid helium? You monitor the temperature on a few server racks, but do you have to measure ten thousand different datapoints about air and fluid temperature and pressure?<p>Honestly, it&#x27;s a lot of fun, it&#x27;s an exciting thing to be working on, and I don&#x27;t agree with the author when he complains about brain drain. You want brain drain, go and look at the infinitum of startups hawking SaaS grift-ware like it&#x27;s the next best thing since sliced bread. Sorry if we find it more interesting to work on this than on the next B2B way of slicing off a chunk of someone else&#x27;s revenue for providing something obvious. &quot;We do these things because they are hard&quot;, as the saying goes.