Surface Code

On paper, the qubits to break RSA-2048 fell from a million to tens of thousands in a year, but the smaller machines trade the saving for weeks of runtime. Oratomic raised $300M to build one.

Phantom codes, QLDPC codes, iceberg codes, cat qubits, neural decoders. Five years ago, surface codes were the only game in town. Now there's a genuine competition, and it might get us to fault tolerance faster than any single approach could.