Either IBM has cracked optically transparent coatings that cycle from 300 to 1K repeatedly and acrylic that has a metal's thermal conductivity, or it's a sham.

Really hard to tell which it could be.

They also have one displayed at the Cleveland Clinic main campus _cafeteria_

Imo focusing in “showing off” instead of “providing value” is a bit of a product-smell. Maybe thats just the point tho, IBM seems to prioritize impressing C-suites over actually accomplishing anything

Back in the early 2000s I worked for Cap Gemini in Birmingham England which had a part of the office that was some sort of partnership with IBM GS(I think IBM did the hardware and cap got the services contacts). They also had a big blinkin lights server setup in the middle of the office for clients to see. As a teenage geek in his first tech job I used to love going to peek at it even though I did tape rotation on the real servers in the basement most days.

It's also consistent with IBM's history of just putting what they considered important computers from history on display in their offices.

When I post doc'd at TJW I know they had a big museum like display in the lobby (But this was years ago, who knows if its still there), with ibm computers from history, but also things like babbage's and the like.

Before LLMs/AI became the obvious "next big thing in computing" I remember coming across a fair number of opportunistic devs on LinkedIn trying to promote themselves as "quantum software engineers", and even a just a year or two ago I would see "quantum machine learning" on people's profiles. I remember thinking maybe I had missed something and seeing how many qubits we could even have... needless to say it was (and still is) not enough for any meaningful ML work quite yet.

If you search you can still find some, and, as someone who has spent more than a decade doing actual machine learning, I find the audacity to claim that you're doing any kind of serious software engineering, let along proper ML work, on a quantum computer to be almost impressively audacious.

I think the more convincing argument is that most known applications of quantum computers (sidestepping any hardware practicalities), are for niche problems (in my wheelhouse, quantum simulation), the average person has no (practically advantageous) reason to own a quantum computer.

We'd need to know how to build a useful quantum computer, find a useful algorithm to run on it (factoring large primes lacks broad consumer appeal), and use this demand to fund research into a way to reduce manufacturing and running costs to reasonable levels.

Alternatively we all move in to science labs.