The headline of the article is grossly misleading and has no relation to the paper it is based on. They modeled an extremely simplified toy molecule that doesn't occur in nature (a chain of four hydrogen atoms). Their quantum computer has 20 noisy qubits and can be trivially simulated and outperformed by a laptop. This is solid research, but any practical application is extremely far away, if at all possible.
Why do people continue to lie, or at least irresponsibly overstate, quantum computing results? Is it just a grift for funding? Or are they true believers who think with enough resources, reality will eventually catch up with their hype?
There's a quantum computing "industry". Professors, postdocs, PhD students, courses, conferences, journals, research institutes, government funding agencies, and even startups.
Do you really want all of them to start looking for real jobs just because there are no quantum computers?
We still can't factor all 5-bit numbers (the largest was 15-ish, but even that wasn't general IIRC) on QCs.
Scammy startups are out there claiming all sorts of non-sense; ask them how many
bits (arbitrary) they can run Shor's algorithm on and all their hyperbolic claims
fall flat. Shor's alg. is still the gold-standard when it comes to QC's definitive
advantages on Classical machines (all the ML ones have been disproved IIRC).
All of the words in the above sentence are important, because they'll weasel out and
cheat if you don't include them (even Google/IBM do this).
