Comment by andrewla
2 days ago
I'm a skeptic as well, but calling it a "scam" is a bit extreme. I think QC proponents are acting in good faith, and I believe that it is worth chasing a little longer since we don't yet have a convincing model for why QC will or won't work (although I think the Gil Kalai's work in this area is intuitively correct I don't think that we have a physical explanation for why quantum error correction would not work).
The current emphasis on NISQ systems is a bit of a desperate measure because the most we can get out of such systems is evidence that quantum computing can work in theory; they do not advance us towards having a workable quantum computer.
Fwiw:
The last paper I saw posted on hackernews from Gil Kalai included a few explicit predictions about what would be impossible in quantum error correction.
This was a paper from a few years back.
The problem is that now Google has published results which imply that some Kalai's predictions turned out false.
The paper in question is Google's recent "below threshold"/"beyond break-even" QEC paper. I believe Kalai was predicting below threshold QEC to be impossible IIRC, among other things.
Not sure if Kalai has responded or updated his predictions, I haven't been following him closely.
Although I agree that "scam" is extreme, the commercial side was sullied in the early 2010s by D-Wave selling what they described as "quantum computers" for $10m and spinning up a bunch of misleading PR. Of course you expect a certain deree of "fake it til you make it" in such companies, but they'd been going for over a decade at that point. This was all kicking off as I was doing my PhD in the field. It was eye-opening to see how little attention was paid to serious academics vs hucksters, and how companies like Google could be duped into spending millions on basically nothing.