alt Hacker NewsI am of the view the 17000 is simply referring to once they had the system set in the final stage they are happy with. They ran 17000 qubits through it over the course of testing and it led to a fidelity of 99%. Which is useful as fidelity is important, although this still isn't accurate enough, but it is no where near programmable general quantum computer.
They had something like 58000 atoms in their lattice and managed to form 17000 qubits from atom pairs.
Pretty impressive already yeah, I'm sure either their team or another research team will try to improve the qubit yield. Increasing the atom count could be harder though, I'm not an expert but at some point you run into limits from the size of your lab/cooler/trap.
And yeah 99.9% fidelity is not anything groundbreaking, but it's pretty surprising for a "first try" on a new gate implementation. In contrast superconducting systems have been worked on for years and years with ridiculous amounts of investment and also only get 3 nines of fidelity, and IonQ just recently demonstrated 4 nines fidelity, but only after working on their system for many years too.