[cohomologo]

The point where it gets interesting for realistic physics and chemistry applications is around 100 (error-corrected) logical qubits and 10^8 coherent operations, see for example https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.03859.

The error correction adds another factor of at least 100 or so in both qubits and gates needed (but possibly much bigger than 100, depending on qubit quality), see for example https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2316.

Other fields of application - factoring large integers, for example - takes many many more qubits to be interesting.

While it's good to get people excited about the potential of quantum computing, it's seems a bit disingenious to suggest that a 17-bit quantum processor is commercially interesting. I especially like how they juxtapose it with the publically available 16-bit quantum processor to make it seem like one extra qubit makes it worth paying money...

[marcosdumay]

I dunno. How many qbits one would need to improve DFT chemical calculations?

You don't need too much precision to determine if a chemical reaction will happen or not. You do need many operations, but not many bits.

[stil]

Don't forget cryptography.

[Arelius]

That's covered by "factoring large integers", I do believe.

[VMG]

There is more to crypto than that, right? The discrete logarithm problem is independent of integer factorization.