Is this new processor capable of achieving reliable and practically useful results beyond the capabilities of classical machines? The answer is almost certainly, no.

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spr-alex 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, and this was true starting with IBM Boston. I think anything before Dec 2025 could be picked apart as too noisy in particular due to crosstalk problems, for example on Pittsburgh. From the IBM Boston QPU build to the R2s, the fidelity allows for compute beyond what classical computers can do for quantum applications.

IBM has an advantage tracker that needs more submissions https://quantum-advantage-tracker.github.io/

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antonvs a day ago | parent | prev [-]

As a pure research project with possible implications in the indefinite future, this is very interesting.

The problem is that the US approach to funding research has backed itself into a corner. Every research advance in a technologically relevant industry has to be presented as though a commercial product is just around the corner, because no-one will pay for the research otherwise.

Eventually, though, the market will get tired of the endless unfulfilled projections and you'll get a "quantum winter".

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spr-alex a day ago | parent [-]

in terms of progress quantum winter most likely already happened during COVID and there will no longer be any pause in progress.

between 2021-2024 technical progress was not impressive, and companies failed to build what they were trying to at the pace they wanted to. Since the end of 2024 this is no longer the case and progress is constant. To me it seems increasingly likely that by 2030 we'll have fault tolerant compute across multiple modalities including IBM's superconductors.

	▲	antonvs 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		“Winter” in this case refers to drying up of investor interest and confidence, due to promises and expectations not being lived up to. The classic example is “AI winter”, of which there were two major ones. The result of that is lack of funding and a dramatic reduction in research.