> I remember an article that even google's lab could not make final verdict if they work or not. Forgot the computer name

I know exactly what you're talking about, and you're wildly off the mark on the significance of that.

As a complete layman, quantum computing seems like it could be like AI. AI for the longest time was a scam. Like, it was clearly improving, but only in marginal increments. The bar was so low though... even the state of the art was garbage - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot), for example. Eventually it was starting to seem like narrow applications of CNNs/machine learning would be the future of AI, but that general purpose AI would be garbage forever. It took the attention/transformer breakthrough (and someone to realize how to use it) before we hit the explosive improvement in general purpose AI that we see today. Quantum computing could still be in the "Tay" phase right now.

>AI for the longest time was a scam. Like, it was clearly improving, but only in marginal increments.

AI was improving a lot, we just kept moving the goalposts. AI is not just chatbots. But nitpicking aside, I get what you're saying and I agree.

AI was mostly based on machine learning, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there were very primitive AI/ML examples even decades ago. Thus, I agree with the parent.