These machines do not provide any computational speedup, we have plenty of papers coming from academic physicists clearly showing this. Why these people insist with their narrative is beyond my comprehension at this stage (maybe, artificially increase the value of their market shares?)..

P.S. I was involved in semiconductor physics and quantum computing way before it became a buzz word.

Yes but if you’re involved in physics you know that physics papers are rich in discourse with correct and incorrect ideas alike.

With Phoenix IBM has a system with over 100 qubits close to 99.9 2Q Fidelity and though that does not sound like much it’s already enough to run operations that can’t be computed classically. The system is so well built that most of these qubits can perform well without crosstalk errors hindering execution, and with phoenix they solved mid circuit reset which didn’t work well before, blocking experiments for meaningful runtime error correction.

There’s an open scoreboard ibm runs open to all to submit problems demonstrating algorithmic breakthroughs https://quantum-advantage-tracker.github.io/

I too am convinced that RSA-4096 will remain secure for the foreseeable future. Why everyone's mental about Quantum Safe encryption is beyond me.

Because peeps are doing HNDL (harvest now, decrypt later) today. They are intercepting your traffic and storing it until they can break crypto. They're doing that today. And they've been doing it for a while.

There are contexts in which that's an unacceptable level of risk.

Classic odds/stakes. What do the odds have to be of a surprise quantum breakthrough before the stakes are serious? 1 in… a million? A billion?

I don’t understand who the target audience of these ads is. For most people, including myself, this is like seeing an ad for “New and Improved Time Machine! (Untested)” or “Magic Beans - Indica”.

I agree that they should be doing a press release and a separate technical deep dive.

Here they mix both and don’t get the public. It has always been IBM problem to correctly target the product to the audience.

We see it here again

Everyone who is curious? I mean did you know that you can run something on a real quantum computer for free? Go try out something new, or are we only getting excited about the newest AI slop machine release these days?

Investors

From IBM: "The Quantum Nighthawk Ultimate Extreme Subatomic Interstellar Whizbang Mark II"

Also from IBM: "Bob"

What's the largest semiprime it can factor?

You can attempt 15 yourself if you want:

https://towardsdatascience.com/where-are-we-with-shors-algor...

If you run it over and over again you will eventually get 3 or 5...

They are currently targeting more material science, such as quantum chemistry for drugs discovery or new material discovery. They can’t and do not aim to do prime factorization on those.

Good

Tangential question: do quantum researchers benefit from LLMs in any way?

Quantum software engineer here - yes! I use Claude quite extensively with quantum SDKs like Qiskit and Pennylane. It tends to be very good at scaffolding and architecture, but can spiral or be outright incorrect when it comes to implementing certain algorithms like QAOA.

The real benefit comes from real-world integration - if I'm exploring e.g. a logistics application, it can source real-world data and models very quickly, and suggest quantum appropriate-formulations. Nevertheless, a lot of hand-holding is required.