Harvard/MIT claims Quantum Error Correction

Scott Aaronson announces:

The biggest talk at Q2B this year was yesterday’s announcement, by a Harvard/MIT/QuEra team led by Misha Lukin and Vlad Vuletic, to have demonstrated “useful” quantum error-correction, for some definition of “useful,” in neutral atoms (see here for the Nature paper). To drill down a bit into what they did:

They ran experiments with up to 280 physical qubits, which simulated up to 48 logical qubits. ...

They don’t claim to have demonstrated quantum supremacy with their logical qubits—i.e., nothing that’s too hard to simulate using a classical computer.

Assuming the result stands, I think it’s plausibly the top experimental quantum computing advance of 2023 (coming in just under the deadline!). We clearly still have a long way to go until “actually useful” fault-tolerant QC, which might require thousands of logical qubits and millions of logical gates. But this is already beyond what I expected to be done this year, and (to use the AI doomers’ lingo) it “moves my timelines forward” for quantum fault-tolerance. It should now be possible, among other milestones, to perform the first demonstrations of Shor’s factoring algorithm with logically encoded qubits (though still to factor tiny numbers, of course). I’m slightly curious to see how Gil Kalai and the other quantum computing skeptics wiggle their way out now, though I’m absolutely certain they’ll find a way! Anyway, huge congratulations to the Harvard/MIT/QuEra team for their achievement.

What, is it my job to critique these experiments? He says "assuming the result stands", so he is not so sure himself. This is all I know.