Quantum optimization
Not my field, by any means, but from what I've read I remain suspicious of Quantum Optimization algorithms. The paper linked in the article talks about QAOA and QVE variants.
Aaronson described QAOA last year as "a quantum algorithm that, incredibly, for all the hundreds of papers written about it, has not yet been convincingly argued to yield any speedup for any problem whatsoever" (among other issues). Maybe the situation is better now, but I've yet to see any excitement about QAOA from anyone who's not making a career from it.
As for QVE, early variants, at least, seemed to have various issues that made it impractical in at least most use cases, such as requiring specialized precomputation work for each problem. Some later variants such as EQVE might be better, but again there seems to be a lot of qualification around the actual claims in the actual papers.
Maybe we'll get to the point where you can use QC and some quantum approximation algorithm to, say, compute eigenvectors with genuine quantum speedup for some problems. That could be useful, sure. Will it be economically viable for, oh, a finance company to do that at any useful scale?
The thing about QC is that even as we get better at scaling and error correction, the hardware still looks to be wildly expensive for the foreseeable future. For some applications, notably scientific research, that's OK; there are experiments we can't conduct any other way, and we recognize the value in funding primary research. But in business, cost matters.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
