3 ms·

From a casual observer, it seemed like Microsoft's Majorana approach had hit a wall a few years back when there were retractions by the lead researchers. I wond

• crystal_revenge 2y ago
  > I wonder what's changed? Maybe I'm too cynical, but I suspect pressure from leadership to package whatever they had in vague language and ambiguous terms to create marketing copy that makes it appear the team is doing amazing work even though in two years we'll still be in roughly the same place we are today wrt quantum computing. Reading through the announcement I see lots of interesting sounding ideas and claims that don't matter "designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip" (why does that matter if we're still far, far away from more than a few thousands qubits?) and zero statements about actual capabilities that are novel or ground breaking.
  • RajT88 2y ago
    That chip die sure looks cool though!
  • radioactivist 2y ago
    It's worse than that -- this announcement is about one qubit, so even a few thousand not necessarily close at hand for this platform (let alone millions).
    • erikig 2y ago
      I believe the chip is 8 qubits not just one.
• breckenedge 2y ago
  The ArsTechnica article discusses that. > In fact, there was some controversy over the first attempts to do so, with an early paper having been retracted after a reanalysis of its data showed that the evidence was weaker than had initially been presented. A key focus of the new Nature paper is providing more evidence that Majorana zero modes really exist in this system. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/microsoft-builds-its-first-qubits-lays-out-roadmap-for-quantum-computing/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/microsoft-builds-its...
  • erikig 2y ago
    Thanks for sharing, the ArsTechnica article does a good job of bridging the info from the press release and the research in the Nature paper while addressing the setbacks in the field.