[st00]

Could you expand your thoughts a bit? Scott writes...

“5 minutes refers to the time needed to calculate a single amplitude (or perhaps, several correlated amplitudes) using tensor network contraction. It doesn’t refer to the time needed to generate millions of independent noisy samples, which is what Google’s Sycamore chip does in 3 minutes. For the latter task, more like a week still seems to be needed on the supercomputer."

...but you seem to have a different interpretation?

[dekhn]

A week on a supercomputer is a typical length for a large job. For my PhD work I had supercomputer jobs running for an entire year. Supercomputer time is somethign you can simply buy, and no scientist needs answers that quickly. As long as the problem is classically solvable within a month for less than a few million dollars, you're way ahead of the best QCs.

The QC folks promoting fast solutions for problems that don't need them are selling snake oil.

[ameliaquining]

This is a science project, not a commercial offering. The goal is to prove that it's possible to build a quantum computer that can do something that's intractable on a classical computer.

Unrelatedly, I find it hard to believe that, if a technology were invented that could do quantum simulations in a few minutes that take a week on a classical supercomputer, people wouldn't find economically valuable applications for it.

[andreareina]

Not the GP, but unless you need verifiably independent noisy samples, quantum computers are too noisy to work at practical problem sizes, and afaik there's no clear path to fixing that. I wouldn't say they're 20 years away, but it's an r&d problem not an engineering problem so it's probably not going to be very soon