Scott Aaronson is the guy who keeps claiming quantum supremacy is here every year so he's like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.

the reason people pay attention to him is that he does a good job publicizing both positive and negative results, and accurately categorizing which are bullshit

All I know is he keeps being wrong about quantum supremacy but maybe this is the year he finally gets his wish.

he's been right about it. quantum supremacy was achieved in 2023 (but only for incredibly useless problems)

Yeah I think GP might now prefer his statement(s) to have been about "quantum _advantage_". Which is the modish term after all.

What do you mean? The original 2019 supremacy experiment was eventually simulated, as better classical methods were found, but the followups are still holding strong (for example [4] and [5]). There was recently a series of blog posts by Dominik Hangleiter summarizing the situation: [1][2][3].

[1]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/06/has-quantum-advantag...

[2]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/25/has-quantum-advantag...

[3]: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/02/28/what-is-next-in-quan...

[4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04792

[5]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02501

Minor update: Dominik condensed the blog posts into a pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09901

Agree. Scott is exactly correct when he just straight calls it crap.

It's inaccurate to say it wins on small numbers because on small numbers you would use classical computers. By the time you get to numbers that take more than a minute to factor classically, and start dreaming of quantum computers, you're well beyond the size where you could tractably do the proposed state preparation.

Well, the reviewers missed it too.

What reviewers? It's not a peer reviewed article.

Ok.

Honestly i think he was remarkably polite given the sort of crap we are talking about.

I believe the appropriate technical term is "bollocks" rather than "crap", see https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf.

That slide deck is complaining that correct work on quantum attacks should be seen as negligible priority or as distractions. TFA is complaining that JVG isn't even correct. They are pretty different concerns.

To be clear, I think that slide deck will be looked back upon as naive. In particular, it makes the classic mistake of assuming the size of number factored should be growing smoothly. That's naive because 15 is such a huge cost outlier and because quantum error correction has frontloaded costs. See [1] and [2] for details.

[1]: https://algassert.com/post/2500

[2]: https://algassert.com/post/2503