But it only seems to be labs and companies that also have a vested interest in selling it as a product that are able to achieve these breakthroughs. Which is a little suspect, right?

too tinfoil hat. google is perfectly happy to spend billions dogfooding their own TPUs and not give the leading edge to the public.

I’m not saying they’re phoney - just we need to take this stuff with a big pinch of salt.

The Microsoft paper around the quantum “ breakthrough ” is in a different field, but maybe a good example of why we need to be a little more cautious of research-as-marketing

Yea, except that we see "breakthrough" stuff like this all the time, and it almost always is quickly found out that it's fraudulent in some way. How many times are we to be fooled before we catch on and don't believe press releases with massive selection bias?