alt Hacker NewsEverything. They have done for decades, and will do for decades. And what IBM focus on is probably worth looking into.
IBM (imho) is in the absolute frontline in quantum computers. One could argue if the number of startups in QC means that there is an actual market or not. Companies that lives on VC or the valuation of their stock.
But IBM is not showy, not on the front pages, does not live on VC or stock valuation. IBM makes tons of money decade after decade from customers that are also not showy but makes tons of money. Banks, financial institutions, energy, logistics, health care etc etc. If IBM thinks these companies will benefit from using QC from IBM (and pay tons of money for it), there is quite probably some truth in QC becoming useful in the near future. Years rather than decades.
IBM have run the numbers and have decided that spending the money for engineering, research required is outweighs the money possible to earn on QC services. QCs powerful enough to run the QC-supported algorithms these companies need to make more tons of money. And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.
> And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.
Evidence for this is in the number of articles that talk about simulated annealing/quantum annealing (or other optimization problems) w/r/t QC rather than crypto. Sure attention seeking headlines always focus on prime factoring, and the security aspect has a lot more enthusiast interest, but when you look past that into deeper stuff, a lot of the focus is on the optimization.
And many industries can dramatically benefit from better optimization - think about how many companies are at their core bin-packers or traveling salesmen.... off the top of my head anything in logistics, airlines, many aspects of the energy sector, and on and on.
The flash is in reading secrets, the money is in quantum annealing.