Ars Technica's John Timmer attended D-Wave's Qubits users conference last week and writes about what he learned:
"The D-Wave quantum annealer isn't a general-purpose computer, in that it can only solve a set of problems that can be structured as energy minimizations. And even on those problems, D-Wave employees will acknowledge that the current generation of D-Wave hardware generally can't outperform algorithms implemented on standard computers (though they're optimistic that the next generation of machines may change that in some cases).
But a key reason the company has been selling time on their machines before they have a clear advantage is to give developers the chance to identify the sorts of problems where quantum annealing will prove to be effective. Last week, Ars attended a D-Wave user's group meeting, where we got a chance to talk to the people who are developing software to run on these systems. We also spoke with D-Wave's staff. What emerged was a sense of the sorts of things that people are hoping will be able to demonstrate a clear speedup when run on a sufficiently advanced quantum annealer."
Read the article at Ars Technica.