“Want to come to a quantum computing party?”

I wasn’t expecting the question. My brain was hurting: I’d just finished an hour-long interview with Jarrod McClean, a Google quantum computing scientist, and I was mentally planning to write up my notes. His talk had caught my attention the day before: McClean spoke animatedly, bobbing a magnificent head of shoulder-length ringlets, as he pointed at equations and diagrams on a PowerPoint presentation. His audience consisted of a room full of physicists at the American Physical Society March meeting, the largest physics conference in the world, and I was there to write for the organization’s newsletter. The first quantum computer algorithms, McClean told me, will simulate progressively more complicated molecules with the goal of eventually discovering new useful materials.

Sure, I thought, I could do with some lighter chitchat. McClean dug around in his backpack and handed me a postcard with a spiky black ferrofluid droplet splattering onto itself. Above the droplet, the words: “Google Quantum AI Party. Thursday, March 8, 7:30 p.m. Rooftop, Standard Hotel.”

It was easily the most glamorous physics party I’d ever set foot in—and elaborate by non-physics standards, too. Surrounded by an open-air view of the LA skyline, the venue had two open bars, fake plants bent to resemble larger-than-life cats, and a sprawling table of finger foods. Performance artists slinked by in pairs, draped in what looked like long beige curtains embroidered with red flowers. They did not respond to questions. Next to the waterbed pods, a small gang of researchers huddled over a laptop, trying to hammer out the next day’s PowerPoint slides.

“This would’ve been unimaginable five years ago,” said physicist Stephen Jordan, a Microsoft researcher I ran into near the elevator. “We didn’t have the money or the attitude.”

They certainly have the attitude now. Last year, the big names in quantum computing—Google, Intel, IBM—announced new technology milestones every few months. In November, IBM announced a 50-qubit quantum computer. Last week, Google announced a 72-qubit one. At the party, Google physicist John Martinis, who heads the company’s quantum hardware division, told me he thought they were getting close to “quantum supremacy”—meaning that they could soon execute an algorithm that classical computers can’t. Companies and academics want to scale up these machines further, even discussing how they could build them with existing silicon chip manufacturing technology, says physicist Mercedes Gimeno-Segovia of the University of Bristol.

A grad student told me he’d attended two other posh quantum computing parties in the same week—one thrown by IBM, and the other by Bay Area-based Rigetti, which produces quantum hardware and software. “IBM commissioned a cocktail called ‘gin entanglement,’” said Edward Leonard of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to one of the mechanisms by which qubits compute in a quantum computer. But, you know, with elderflower liqueur instead of superconducting circuits. “It was good,” he said. “A lot like a gin and tonic.”

But the celebrations may still be premature. At the conference, attended by some 11,000 people, several presenters were careful to point out that quantum computers will need around a million qubits before they’re broadly useful—far more than Google’s 72, putatively the reason for its shindig. Right now, scientists are still testing that their quantum computers work, which means they have only been implementing simple algorithms. For example, researchers at Google and IBM have simulated small molecules like hydrogen that physicists already understand well. Intel researchers are preparing to simulate very specific, well-studied phenomena that occur in groups of electrons. McClean’s algorithms require the use of both quantum and classical computers to achieve accuracy.