> I immediately start to approach the author of this with distrust:

> * He's writing about multiverses

> * He's claiming a quantum performance for something that would take a classical computer septillions of years.

> I'm a layman in this domain

I think your skepticism is well-founded. But as you learn more about the field, you learn what parts are marketing/hype bullshit, and what parts are not, and how to translate from the bullshit to the underlying facts.

IMO:

> He's writing about multiverses

The author's pet theory, no relevance to the actual science being done.

* He's claiming a quantum performance for something that would take a classical computer septillions of years.

The classical computer is running a very naive algorithm, basically brute-force. It is very easy to write a classical algorithm which is very slow. But still, in the field, it takes new state-of-the-art classical algorithms run on medium size clusters to get results that are on-par with recent quantum computers. Not even much better, just on-par.

> Or is this just how technology breakthroughs start (after all the Transformer paper wasn't)

You could say that. It's not truly a breakthrough, but it is one more medium-size step in a rapidly advancing field.