I'm pretty intrigued by this. Martinis is very good, and I already thought it was interesting when I saw earlier today that Google had picked him up. That he wi

I'm pretty intrigued by this. Martinis is very good, and I already thought it was interesting when I saw earlier today that Google had picked him up. That he will be trying to improve D-Wave style designs (by dropping in transmons, from the sound of this article) is not at all what I would have guessed. I think that will be fairly tough. It's been a while since I looked at D-Wave, but aside from the whole "is it quantum" question about their stuff, their fabrication always seemed like a real strength. They had tons of on-chip circuits for addressing all of the qubits, and building devices with that many Josephson junctions that work is not easy. The comment that some of their material choices are probably limiting coherence is almost certainly true (this was one of Martinis's big contributions from ~10 years ago). But translating processes of that complexity to cleaner setups seems like it's going to require some real fabrication fu. I certainly wouldn't put it past Martinis, but it's ambitious for sure.