Nature Communications of the ACM unstructured Grover's algorithm ion quantum algorithms computer machine learning
Despite high hopes for quantum computing, significant progress in hardware, and optimism about future applications, a 2023 Nature spotlight article summarised current quantum computers as being "For now, [good for] absolutely nothing". The article elaborated that quantum computers are yet to be more useful or efficient than conventional computers in any case, though it also argued that in the long term such computers are likely to be useful. A 2023 Communications of the ACM article found that current quantum computing algorithms are "insufficient for practical quantum advantage without significant improvements across the software/hardware stack". It argues that the most promising candidates for achieving speedup with quantum computers are "small-data problems", for example in chemistry and materials science. However, the article also concludes that a large range of the potential applications it considered, such as machine learning, "will not achieve quantum advantage with current quantum algorithms in the foreseeable future", and it identified I/O constraints that make speedup unlikely for "big data problems, unstructured linear systems, and database search based on Grover's algorithm".
