I disagree. Through Scott Aaronson's writings, I gather we still don't have conclusive evidence [1] that anyone's built an actual quantum computer capable of more sophisticated computations than a human 10-year-old can do with pen and paper, and furthermore that it's not clear we'll be able to build such a machine in our lifetimes. I'm not saying it's impossible, but we know it's going to be really hard.
What you're ignoring with your exponential growth argument is that it is also exponentially harder to add one qubit while maintaining usefulness (i.e. long decoherence times).
I'd say, anyone who doesn't want to work either in academia or on "vanity projects" like D-Wave's much-hyped collabs with Lockheed, Google etc. should wait half a decade and see.
[1] Arguably the D-Wave machines are faster than a human, but we don't have evidence (yet) that it's not just a fancy annealing ASIC.
What you're ignoring with your exponential growth argument is that it is also exponentially harder to add one qubit while maintaining usefulness (i.e. long decoherence times).
I'd say, anyone who doesn't want to work either in academia or on "vanity projects" like D-Wave's much-hyped collabs with Lockheed, Google etc. should wait half a decade and see.
[1] Arguably the D-Wave machines are faster than a human, but we don't have evidence (yet) that it's not just a fancy annealing ASIC.