alt Hacker NewsI beg you to read the full story and to not extrapolate from the quote.
Also, in the world of QC, right from its very roots, the ability of QC improved in mind boggling large steps every year. It's only that you cannot see it if you only look at the wrong metric, i.e., factorization records.
It's a bit like saying "classical computing technology has not improved for 50 years, it's only recently that we finally start to have programs that are able to write other programs".
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madars • last Friday at 8:34 PM
A great resource for visually seeing progress is https://sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_landscape (click "Prev"/"Next" to see other years) - it makes very clear that incredible progress is happening - this is a log-log plot.
There is a reason QC factorization records haven't shifted much over the past years. Number of qubits by themselves isn't enough. You to be able to do computation on them and for long enough to run Shor's algorithm till it produces a solution. How the qubits are connected, how reliable the logic gates are and how long you can maintain the quantum coherence with enough fidelity to get results is equally important.
That no significant factorization milestones have moved is a huge critical black eye to this field. Even worse, that no one has ever even been able to truly run Schors algorithm on even trivial numbers is a shocking indictment of the whole field.