{*On China*} ...technophiles, politicians and journalists have been worrying out loud that China is pulling ahead in the effort to harness said weirdness for industry and power, better spying and better computing. Last year Congress passed [...] the National Quantum Initiative Act, a plan to spend $1.2 billion to boost research into quantum technology... {*On Google having achieved quantum supremacy?*} ...many experts suspect that an official announcement, with all the bells and whistles of publicity and proper peer review, is imminent... {*IBM vs Google*} “We need to be very careful about setting expectations,” said Bob Sutor, vice president of Q strategy and ecosystem at IBM, which is competing with Google for a different kind of quantum supremacy. “It’s easy to overhype this stuff.” ...a quartet of scientists from IBM [...] on Monday challenged Google’s claim that the calculation would take 10,000 years on a regular computer. In a paper [...] and in a blog entry [...], they estimated that the task could be accomplished in just two and a half days. Google did not respond to a request for comment. {*Some words of wisdom*} In conversation, Dr. Gil maintained that the term “quantum supremacy” was misleading and rhetorical overkill: “The reality is, the future of computing will be a hybrid between classical computer of bits, A.I. systems and quantum computing coming together.” He and his colleagues would rather that we not judge quantum computers by qubits at all. They prefer a new metric, “quantum volume,” which takes into account both the numbers of qubits and the amount of error correction.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/science/quantum-computer-physics-qubits.html