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5 years ago I was at MIT’s QC lab and 4 qubits was the max number of entangled qubits their machine could reach, sustainably. All the marketing fluff from IBM and Google about hundreds, or thousands, of entangled qubits is misleading - they don’t maintain those entangled states for long durations. Only when we can get hundreds of qubits to maintain entangled states for sustainable periods of time can we then attempt the theoretical use cases of the technology.

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You’re right! The trapped ion approach (IonQ) is the most promising direction toward scalable quantum computing. Superconducting qubits — such as those used by IBM and Google — require extreme cooling while ions can be trapped at room temperature. Superconducting qubits are also plagued by substrate imperfections, while trapped ions — being “nature’s qubits” — are absolutely identical in their quantum mechanical properties. This allows trapped ion quantum computers to realize the best demonstrated gate fidelities.

I still need to be convinced that the exponential power of n qubits grows faster than the exponential complexity of aligning, programming and reading n qubits.

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