Seems like they're shrugging off the question of whether quantum computing has any advantages over classical, and going straight to "use it or you're missing out".
As far as I know, there's still no convincing evidence that today's quantum computers do anything better than classical computers. For example, Google made a very narrow claim of quantum superiority and even this was undermined by subsequent research [1].
It is worth noting that all known classical algorithms to solve this problem scale exponentially with the problem size, and fundamentally there is no reason why putting 60 or 70 qubits in the fridge is particularly more difficult than 53. The point is that while classical algorithm advances can take off orders of magnitude off the runtime, this has to be done _every_ time there is a small increase in the size of the quantum computing device in order to kill a supremacy claim.
(To clarify, I personally think optimization is not a remotely near-term application)
You're assuming that quantum algorithms scale better than classical ones. To the best of my knowledge (which is not much), the cases in which this is known to be true are extremely limited. We have a faster algorithm for factoring numbers, Shor's algorithm, and I'm not sure there's anything of note beyond that.
At this point in time there's no one that has enough logical qubits to do a useful quantum computation. It might be a few decades before someone figures out how to scale up the number of useful qubits. In the meantime a bunch of QC start ups will pop in and out of existence like particles. Very tough field, but that's exactly where I want to see more resources allocated: towards solving difficult problems.
Are there a lot of entries in the AWS marketplace that you can't run on AWS, but instead access remotely? I thought it was mostly things like AMIs (Windows, etc) or managed services you run on top of EC2 VMs (databases systems, etc). But this is actually hardware operated by a third party...
Various SaaS vendors are available via the AWS marketplace, including ones that aren't running on AWS.
For example we pay for Datadog (using their EU region which happens to be on GCP) via our AWS bill. As we have 30 day invoicing with AWS this makes it all very convenient.
I'm not sure how this deal works behind the scenes, but AWS already rented access to D-Wave devices previously via AWS Braket. I wonder if they're continuing to operate the hardware for this. I agree it would be an odd choice to put this in the AWS Marketplace if they're not.
I wonder how far they have come in speeding things up.
A good while back I read an article that said the reviewer
was not sure what was running on the regular chips and what
was not but the performance gains (back then) was not worth the cost.
There is no known reason why it is theoretically impossible.
However, despite many people claiming otherwise, there are currently no situations (other than contrived benchmarks) where a quantum computer is better than a digital computer.
As far as I know, there's still no convincing evidence that today's quantum computers do anything better than classical computers. For example, Google made a very narrow claim of quantum superiority and even this was undermined by subsequent research [1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/googles-quantum-supremacy-...