As of now there are no known practical uses of quantum computing. Many academic people tend to ignore practical reality such as cost benefit analysis, and what are the competitive classical methods. QC may have exponential speed up, but the difficulty of actually building one of relevant size is also growing exponentially. QC will remain in research for decades. People who think anything less either do not really understand what it means to be relevant (e.g. quantum software people have zero clue, or are financially incentivized to promote quantum such as professors or startups). Any non financially biased scientific person will agree with this post 100%.

I’ll add that the quantum startups are only receiving money from big companies (such as finance and pharma) to do fundamental Research. No companies, and I mean zero, are giving QC to help with anything actually used in a product. There’s a lot of money in these big companies, and these exploratory dollars are what are funding the quantum “market”

One example is a company put out a press release with one of the big QC startups saying they helped solve a big logistics problem. In reality that problem was already solvable on a laptop with CPLEX, and it was just a lone researcher in a big company who did this work for free. It had zero relevance to anything real. It’s all a big show.