I went to an interesting talk Wednesday by the CTO of D-Wave. He indicated that their quantum computing hardware is working well enough that their biggest problems are understanding how to use them and explaining that to potential customers.
This implies that they are much further advanced than the impressions I’ve gotten from sources unconnected with D-Wave suggest is plausible. D-Wave is being sufficiently secretive that I can’t put too much confidence in what they imply, but the degree of secrecy doesn’t seem unusual, and I don’t see any major reasons to doubt them other than the fact that they’re way ahead of what I gather many experts in the field think is possible. Steve Jurvetson’s investment in D-Wave several years ago is grounds for taking them fairly seriously.
The implications if this is real are concentrated in a few special applications (quantum computing sounds even more special purpose than I had previously realized), but for molecular modelling (and fields that depend on it such as drug discovery) it means some really important changes. Modelling that previously required enormous amounts of cpu power and expertise to produce imperfect approximations will apparently now require little more than the time and expertise needed to program a quantum computer (plus whatever exorbitant fees D-Wave charges).