In 2019, a Google lab located close to Santa Barbara completed a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the fastest supercomputer in the world 10,000 years, according to the company. The headlines referred to it as “quantum supremacy,” a term that physicist John Preskill had created years prior, essentially as a catchphrase, never fully anticipating that it would become a commercial catchphrase. It was successful. Even though IBM vigorously retaliated, claiming Google had misjudged the capabilities of classical machines, the phrase persisted.
That disagreement was never truly settled. It was simply overshadowed by more recent announcements.
Observing this field from a distance for a few years now, I’ve noticed how little the public discourse has evolved since then. In the same way that people discussed self-driving cars in 2016, we still discuss quantum computing as something that is always five years away, but the five years keeps changing. Google’s 53-qubit processor, Sycamore, solved a problem that was specifically chosen because it could only be used to prove a point. That’s more of an honest assessment of where the field stood and, for the most part, still stands than a critique.
Researchers believe that supremacy isn’t the true story at all. It’s sound. Preskill himself quickly adopted the less glamorous term NISQ, which stands for “noisy intermediate-scale quantum,” admitting that modern qubits are still clumsy, easily disturbed, and prone to mistakes that accumulate the moment you attempt anything ambitious. It takes years of materials science to even partially resolve the paradox that controlling a quantum system requires nearly perfect isolation from the outside world while still allowing external manipulation.
Who, then, is in charge of the future that this technology is purportedly creating? The truth is more complicated than any headline would suggest. There is a quantum lab at Google.
IBM allows outsiders to run jobs on hardware that most people will never see in person thanks to its own roadmap and cloud-accessible machines, known as the Q Experience. China has been funding quantum research with state funds at a rate that has clearly alarmed Washington. A recent report by a congressional commission described quantum leadership and artificial intelligence as nearly a national security asset. So far, none of these players have complete control over anything. They’re racing to a finish line that no one can quite find.
It’s important to note how the pragmatic promises are constantly changing. Every press conference and pitch deck includes topics like drug discovery, improved batteries, fertilizer production without the energy expense of the Haber-Bosch process, and optimization issues for logistics firms attempting to cut fractions off delivery routes. Most likely, some of it is true. Some of it resembles the same theoretical list that quantum scientists have been reciting since Richard Feynman first proposed the concept in 1981, decades before a functional qubit was constructed.
That isn’t exactly cynicism, in my opinion. The discrepancy between what is announced and what is usable is more akin to exhaustion. By most researchers’ own admission, a quantum computer with a few hundred noisy qubits might be completely useless. It’s telling in and of itself that the honest scientists in this field tend to hedge more than the press releases.
The structural change occurring beneath it—governments viewing quantum capability as strategic infrastructure, corporations viewing it as a long-term bet rather than a product line, and a small community of physicists attempting to keep expectations tied to what the hardware can actually do—seems more resilient than any one supremacy claim. In that sense, control isn’t currently held by a single lab or nation. No funding round can completely eliminate the layer of true scientific uncertainty that is dispersed across labs and governments.
It’s still unclear whether that will change in five or fifty years, and it probably won’t for some time.
