> It is unclear how exactly one can verify that a "quantum code" 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.
I would like to know what the article'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's one thing that I am certain of, it's that our end user submissions run on real hardware at a few millikelvin about absolute zero.
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'm also certain that we'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....
If other companies are getting away with anything less and promising they'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?
Honestly, it's a lot of fun, it's an exciting thing to be working on, and I don'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'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's revenue for providing something obvious. "We do these things because they are hard", as the saying goes.