Hey Doug! Thanks! Great to see the IBM quantum team on HackerNews! We've worked really hard to bake scalability into the designs from day 1. Our challenge now is to validate standard 1 and 2 qubit performance metrics on that scalable 2-D qubit lattice. A system with ~16 qubits is big enough to get a reasonable assessment of correlated errors between non-nearest neighbors, and small enough that it's still pretty cheap to build. We've also made some great headway in developing a scalable and low-cost architecture for the control electronics and signal delivery - about 20x cheaper than the standard approaches - and 16 qubits is large enough to really put those to the test.
Be well!
Chad