Most quantum computers need to be cooled to frigid temperatures or contained in space-like vacuum chambers. Using light to do the computation avoids both of those fates, but at a cost—how do you hold a light beam in your hand long enough to do the computation? There are many approaches, and now a team in Japan has created a light-based quantum machine that's capable of many different computations, and will be available on the cloud in 2025.
Now we just need to find an example where quantum computing is actually faster, and not just because only one of the 2 were optimized.