Sure, we can hand-wave away that it'll revolutionise *something*, but there's no direct candidate on the horizon. As of today, at best we can hope that more accurate quantum simulations could lead to some breakthrough tech, but that's a very indirect revolution at best.
With LASER, at least, there was a bunch of known use-cases that were blocked by the availability of the tech. There are no such equivalents here.
My own view is that for a lot of (but not all[1]) problems for which we have a quantum algorithm improvement, we maybe already have a heuristic that gets us 95% of the way there just as quickly. So the application of a QC on these problems is buying us a massive speedup, but only if you need to get the perfect, optimal answer. And sometimes you do!
[0]https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/
[1]Factoring large primes is a good counter example.
This kind of improvement is nice, but it would mean that quantum computers are no moe exciting than video cards.
Edit: This is a result of the linear speedup theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_speedup_theorem
If we assume quantum computing is the same as SIMD, yeah, I wouldn't be excited either.
Um... That seems like a pretty high bar to me, actually. Are you forgetting about how much they've done to speed up the training of quite a lot of deep-learning models? And really the only competition is TPUs and other dedicated chips that, at the end of the day, are also just chips optimized for matrix operations. The graphics in state of the art video games? Were I fan of crypto, mining rigs? That's some pretty impactful tech right there.
To be clear, I'm not saying that linear speedup is an innovation comparable to the video card, I'm saying it _is_ a glorified video card or ASIC.
E.g. processing 1000 elements with an n^2 algorithm requires a million operations, with n^1.5 only ~31.5k. Processing a million elements goes from a trillion ops to a billion, a 1000x improvement.
i remember that even the 'factoring of 15' on a quantum computer uses some special hacks (that needs the answer) to code it in.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/post-quantu...
For example, most symmetric key algorithms are already QC-safe; in particular, AES would still be safe even in a world where you could build a QC with as many gates as a modern chip.
Of course, there is an asterisk here, as the set of all problems for which QCs give exponential/super-polynomial speedups over known classical algorithms is not yet known (not even at the level where we have some confidence that P != NP). Everything I'm claiming is based on currently known quantum algorithms, and on belief about the properties of QCs in general (i.e. that they can only solve more efficiently problems that display certain rare characteristics).
Most of the time, technology that is leading edge is only there for a short period, as its either bought out or lacks funding. With IBM, they have the funds to start revolutions, and have a larger vision at play. However, quantum computing is not a widely accepted concept due to a lot of its complexities, which is likely why its such a niche area. Given time and money, which IBM can handle, something will happen.