NISQ
The label for today's quantum computers — enough qubits to be beyond simulation, too noisy to be useful.
John Preskill coined the term in 2018: Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum. It describes machines with roughly fifty to a few hundred physical qubits, without error correction, where circuit depth is limited by how long the state survives. You get a few dozen gate layers before noise takes over.
The entire research field around hybrid algorithms such as VQE and QAOA grew out of trying to extract something useful from this constraint. Preskill himself was measured in his expectations, and that judgement has held — convincing practical value in the NISQ era has not materialised, and the emphasis has shifted to reaching error-corrected machines instead.