alt Hacker NewsTBH you need to take the youtube influencer Sabine Hoffenfelder with a bigger grain of salt. She has converted to mainly posting clickbait youtube stuff over the last years (unfortunately, she was interesting to listen to earlier).
The RCS is a common benchmark with no practical value, as is stated several times in the blog announcement as well. It's used because if a quantum computer can't do that, it can't do any other calculation either.
The main contribution here seems to be what they indeed put first, which is the error correction scaling.
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As a counterpoint, she recently reviewed a paper in one of her recent videos and completely tore it to shreds as apparently the math was full of absolute nonsense.
This was a fascinating watch, and not the kind of content that is easy to find. Besides videos like that one, I enjoy her videos as fun way to absorb critical takes on interesting science news.
Maybe she is controversial for being active and opinionated on social media, but we need more science influencers and educators like her, who don't just repeat the news without offering us context and interpretation.
I have observed the change in approach to use aggressive (clickbaity) thumbnails, but I do think the quality of the content has not changed.
And I can't blame her for adopting this trend, in many cases it is the difference between surviving or not on YouTube nowadays.
Just because she is a YouTuber doesn't diminish her other credentials, just as she is incetivised to do clickbait, so are actual scientific communication outlets such as nature, and the more clicky they are the more downloads and citation they will acquire. Incentives change content but don't directly detract from someone's expertise. See: the fact that most universities now publish some lectures on YouTube, it doesn't make the content any less true.
she was right the first time when they announced this in 2019 and this time even they admit in their own press release:
> Of course, as happened after we announced the first beyond-classical computation in 2019, we expect classical computers to keep improving on this benchmark
As IBM showed their estimate of classical computer time is taken out of their a**es.
I think simplifying her to 'youtube influencer' is unfair - she is a doctor of theoretical physics with a specialism in quantum gravity who produces science content for youtube. She knows the field enough to comment.
She doesn't even say that this isn't a big leap (she says it's very impressive - just not the sort of leap that means that there are now practical applications for quantum computers, and that a pinch of salt is required on the claim of comparisons to a conventional computer due to the 2019 paper with a similar benchmark).