Quantum Computer is 10^80 faster than a conventional computer

The press release sounds like they've developed a quantum computer, but this is not borne out by that article. While there is lots of promising work in quantum computing as a whole, this as I understand it can't be used for that, because you can't tune the qubit interactions individually but you can only tell the whole lot to do the same thing. (At least, the abstract doesn't seem to discuss anything more complicated than giving them all a ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic coupling.)

If that's correct, then this article seems overstated. At the very least, I know there are now "optical lattices" of qubits made from atoms supercooled into a Bose-Einstein condensate and then relaxed into a very pure square lattice. You don't have to know what that means, just know that with some method which is now reasonably well known, you can get much much more than 300 atoms interacting via quantum mechanics. Like, optical lattices get hundreds of thousands, if my memory serves me correctly. So this isn't, like, the biggest entangled system ever demonstrated of this form -- not by far. It might be the biggest which has this level of tunable Ising interaction, that I don't know. But there are now tons of approaches to quantum computing, and yes, some of them can throw much larger numbers at the problem than just 300.

The very nice thing here seems to be the quantum entanglements getting done over a spacing of 30 microns. That might not mean much to you, but the optical lattice work is done at tiny spacings, and it becomes extremely difficult to do any sort of individual readout. 30 microns means that you have a lot of leverage to address individual atoms. If you could get them all to entangle with each other and then you could manipulate them individually with some gates, you might be able to get some good quantum error correction set up.

That probably also doesn't mean anything to you. The important fact about quantum error correction is this: once your QEC is reliably set up, you have passed the critical barrier and you can scale up arbitrarily to a quantum computer by just throwing more atoms at the problem.