[HN Gopher] Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
Author : eksu
Score : 292 points
Date : 2025-02-19 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (azure.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (azure.microsoft.com)
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > Majoranas hide quantum information, making it more robust, but
| also harder to measure. The Microsoft team's new measurement
| approach is so precise it can detect the difference between one
| billion and one billion and one electrons in a superconducting
| wire - which tells the computer what state the qubit is in and
| forms the basis for quantum computation.
| dudus wrote:
| Being able to detect a single electron among billions sounds
| more like a good way to get entropy rather than something that
| can help with quantum measurements. At least that's my initial
| intuition being completely ignorant in Quantum Computing.
| drpossum wrote:
| Do you have other things you want to provide that your self-
| proclaimed ignorance would be helpful with?
| spuz wrote:
| Lay people are welcome to read about the latest
| developments in science. They're also welcome to try to
| intuit theories related to those latest developments. It's
| a good way to flex your thinking skills. Experts are then
| welcome to weigh in on those intuitions and steer them
| along the right path. Even if you're completely wrong,
| expressing how you think about things is also helpful to
| others in case they also have similar intuitions.
|
| Your comment could get an award for most toxic HN comment
| ever and that's saying something.
| drpossum wrote:
| I mean, I'll it admit the original post ironically did
| measurably increase the entropy of the thread.
| Mithriil wrote:
| It doesn't detect a single electron, it detects parity of the
| number of electrons.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| NYT feature:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/technology/microsoft-quan...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Nature paper: _Interferometric single-shot parity measurement in
| InAs-Al hybrid devices_
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08445-2
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Discussion on other official post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43103623
| kenjackson wrote:
| I need HN's classic pessimism to know if this is something to be
| excited about. Please chime in!
| jassyr wrote:
| Whenever I read about a scientific breakthrough I login to HN
| to see what the smart people think about it, and am
| disappointed if there isn't a post with hundreds of comments.
| miztrskinnr wrote:
| This isn't a forum of smart people. It's a forum of asocial
| tech workers who write in authoritative prose but are just
| normal people at home staring blankly at a blue glow of a
| mental bug zapper
|
| Quantum is just the next form of sampling the electromagnetic
| field. It'll provide mesmerizing computational properties but
| not rewrite human DNA or beam our consciousness to another
| galaxy; it'll fill up RAM and disk really fast with
| impenetrable amount of data it will take decades to analyze
| and build real experiments across contexts to verify.
| Tomorrow will still come and be a lot like yesterday for us.
|
| All in all it's more of the same
|
| Even if it we do beam our minds it's just a copy. These meat
| suits still gonna stop experiencing someday. Life for us
| isn't going anywhere.
| dcist wrote:
| Now THIS is the sort of nihilistic outlook that keeps me
| coming back for a hit of HN.
| jassyr wrote:
| It's like some sort of Cunningham's Law Inception.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > It'll provide mesmerizing computational properties
|
| Maybe, one day, or never.
|
| In the mean time, it will generate a lot of hot and humid
| hype.
| drpossum wrote:
| You had me up to "normal people"
|
| > but not rewrite human DNA
|
| _smugly_ but writing DNA is a quantum process
| badlibrarian wrote:
| > people at home staring blankly at a blue glow of a mental
| bug zapper
|
| Nonsense. Many of us have installed that glitchy software
| that makes our screens orange sometimes.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I wouldn't trust HN one bit (or one qubit) to comment usefully
| on this question, but presumably hundreds of people are already
| bugging Scott Aaronson to blog about it. He'll probably have a
| post in the next couple days saying whether we have permission
| to be excited.
| drpossum wrote:
| Just look at all the hard numbers they provided after you strip
| away the hype talk.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > "Every single atom in this chip is placed purposefully. It is
| constructed from ground up. It is entirely a new state of
| matter. Think of us as building the picture by painting it atom
| by atom."
|
| https://youtu.be/wSHmygPQukQ (~7:55)
|
| I don't know if marketing BS could get more hyperbolic than
| this.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| AI hype is running out of steam, the stock needs quantum
| power. MSFT is only up 1.99% for the past 1Y.
| ykonstant wrote:
| Hear me out, investors: Quantum Intelligence.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| You're late to the game: https://quantumai.google/
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| Right off the bat "can scale to a million qubits" tells you
| it's BS since it only says what could be possible but makes
| zero claims about what it current _does_.
|
| I mean my basement can scale to holding thousands of bars of
| solid gold, but currently houses... 0.
| tmvphil wrote:
| I work in the field. While all players are selling a dream
| right now, this announcement is even more farcical. Majoranas
| are still trying to get to the point where they have even one
| qubit that could be said to exist and whose performance can be
| quantified.
|
| The majorana approach (compared with more mature technologies
| like superconducting circuits or trapped ions) is a long game,
| where there are theoretical reasons to be optimistic, but where
| experimental reality is so far behind. It might work in the
| long run, but we're not there yet.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| >> I need HN's classic pessimism to know if this is something
| to be excited about. Please chime in!
|
| > While all players are selling a dream right now, this
| announcement is even more farcical.
|
| Thanks a lot, I didn't get disappointed.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Another take, to feed your cynicism: MSFT need money to
| keep investing in this sort of science. By posting
| announcements like this they hope to become the obvious
| place for investors interested in quantum to park their
| money. Stock price goes brrr, MSFT wins.
|
| More cynical still: what exactly has the Strategic Missions
| and Technologies unit achieved in the last few years?
| Burned a few billion on Azure for Operators, and sold it
| off. Got entangled and ultimately lost the JEDI mega deal
| at the DoD. Was notably _not_ the unit that developed or
| brought in AI to Microsoft. Doing anything in quantum is
| good news for whoever leads this division, and they need
| it.
|
| On the bright side, this is still fundamentally something
| to be celebrated. Years ago major corporations did basic
| science research and we are all better off for those folk.
| With the uncertainty around the future of science funding
| in the US right now, I at least draw some comfort in the
| fact that its still happening. My jaded-ness about press
| releases in no way diminishes my respect for the science
| that the lab people are publishing.
| benhauer wrote:
| Does MSFT sell new stock? If not, how does the stock
| price going up affect their ability to invest?
| tibbar wrote:
| Even if Microsoft doesn't sell the stock it controls, its
| existing assets become more valuable when the stock price
| goes up. There are many ways one could spend those
| resources if needed: sell it off, borrow against the
| assets, trade the stock for stock in other companies.
|
| However, since Microsoft has plenty of cash flow already,
| they can probably afford to just sit on the investment.
| cubefox wrote:
| > MSFT need money to keep investing in this sort of
| science
|
| Microsoft is making absurd amounts of money from Azure
| and Office (Microsoft 365) subscriptions. Any quantum
| computing investment is a drop in the bucket for this
| company.
| tempaccount420 wrote:
| That's all you needed?
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| So you are saying its official fake news from Redmond ?
| erikig wrote:
| 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 wonder what's changed?
|
| https://cacm.acm.org/news/majorana-meltdown-jeopardizes-micr...
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| That chip die sure looks cool though!
| radioactivist wrote:
| 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).
| breckenedge wrote:
| 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...
| ckbishop wrote:
| RSA in trouble when?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| 1 qubit prototype can crack RSA? 1million scaled out qubits is
| still talk
| AlanYx wrote:
| Not even 1 qubit, just "substantial progress towards the
| realization of a topological qubit" (from the accompanying
| Nature paper).
| r33b33 wrote:
| Please someone give input on this. It's extremely important and
| worrying.
| eamag wrote:
| What do they mean by
|
| >can create an entirely new state of matter - not a solid, liquid
| or gas but a topological state
| sukhavati wrote:
| through geometry and configuration of materials, you can create
| quantum effects on a macroscopic scale
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Matter refers to particles or collection of particles that have
| mass+volume. These particles can be arranged or behave in
| different ways, and that is roughly what a "state of matter"
| is. You know how in solid all the atoms are fixed, but in a gas
| atoms/molecules are flying about.
|
| There are in fact other forms of matter. In plasma you just
| have ions (instead of atoms/molecules) just zipping about. In
| neutron stars, you have pretty much only neutrons collapsed
| into a packed ball.
|
| You can also make systems at higher levels of abstraction that
| have some of this matter or particle like behavior. A simple
| example is "phonons", which are a small packet of vibration (of
| atoms) that travels inside a solid much like a photon travels
| through space. I think phonons don't have a "mass", so they are
| not matter.
|
| Here, they construct a quantum system, some of whose degrees of
| freedom behave like a matter particle. Qubits are then made
| from the states of this particle.
| layer8 wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_order.
| radioactivist wrote:
| For reference topological phases of matter have been observed
| in other contexts since the mid-1980s. So "entirely new" here
| is misleading.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| We are approaching a full "post truth" society, nothing will be
| sacred.
| paulirwin wrote:
| Can someone check my understanding: does this mean they have
| eight _logical_ qubits on the chip? It appears that way from the
| graphic where it zooms into each logical qubit, although it only
| shows two there.
|
| If that is true, it sounds like having a plan to scale to
| millions of _logical_ qubits on a chip is even more impressive.
| fsh wrote:
| They have never demonstrated even a single physical qubit.
|
| Microsoft has claimed for a while to have observed some
| signatures of quantized Majorana conductance which might
| potentially allow building a qubit in the future. However,
| other researches in the field have strongly criticized their
| analysis, and the field is full of retracted papers and
| allegations of scientific misconduct.
| ABS wrote:
| this is from 2 days ago:
|
| Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using
| topological qubit arrays https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12252
| dwnw wrote:
| it is amazing at what passes for an academic paper these
| days
| tmvphil wrote:
| They have no qubits at all, "logical" or not. yet. They plan to
| make millions. It is substantially easier to release a plan for
| millions of qubits than it is to make even one.
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| My first scan parsed that as "Marijuana 1 quantum processor".
| Very high performance ...
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > Very high performance ...
|
| From the user's perspective, of course.
| jonbell wrote:
| For me it was more than my first scan. I understand the word is
| Majorana, but when I go to pronounce it or read it, my brain
| reports back "Major-auwana."
|
| The people who signed off on this name a) do a lot of drugs or
| b) didn't notice because they have never come anywhere near
| weed
| oynqr wrote:
| I read "Majorana 1 aquarium processor". I am not high.
| outside2344 wrote:
| Might be a more truthful name honestly too
| 2dvisio wrote:
| This is the reason why is called like that. Is pronounced Ma-y-
| orana
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana
| tclancy wrote:
| >likely dying in or after 1959
|
| That is how I would like my obit to read as well.
| 65 wrote:
| Hah, I read it as "Manjaro" at first glance.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Microsoft's topological qubit architecture has aluminum
| nanowires joined together to form an H. Each H has four
| controllable Majoranas and makes one qubit. These Hs can be
| connected, too, and laid out across the chip like so many tiles.
|
| So they are not all in a superposition with each other? They talk
| about a million of these nanowires but that looks a bit like
| quantum dots?
| hulitu wrote:
| > Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor
|
| What is Win 11 boot time on this processor ? Will it be supported
| in the next version of Windows ? /s
| cgcrob wrote:
| Are these actually even useful yet? Genuine question. I never
| managed to solicit and answer, only long explanations which
| seemed to have an answer of yes and no at the same time depending
| on who you observe.
| fooker wrote:
| No.
|
| The long explanations boil down to this: quantum computers (
| _so far_ ) are better ( _given a million qubits_ ) than
| classical computers at ( _problems that are in disguise_ )
| simulating quantum computers.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| given a million qubits ...
|
| also last time I checked the record was 80 qubits and with
| every doubling of the cubits the complexity of the system and
| the impurities and the noise are increasing. so it's even
| questionable whether there will ever be useful quantum
| computers
| Agentus wrote:
| i vaguely remember reading an article about solving the
| correlation between quantum decoherence and scaling of
| qubit numbers. i dont understand quantum computers so take
| it with a grain of salt.
|
| but here's what perplexity says: "Exponential Error
| Reduction: Willow demonstrates a scalable quantum error
| correction method, achieving an exponential reduction in
| error rates as the number of qubits increases125. This is
| crucial because qubits are prone to errors due to their
| sensitivity to environmental factors25. "
| ABS wrote:
| Microsoft Research entire point is that their approach will
| allow "fault-tolerant quantum computing
| architecture based on noise-resilient, topologically
| protected Majorana-based qubits."
|
| Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using
| topological qubit arrays https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12252
| patates wrote:
| Usually when people try to explain something about
| quantum computers, it feels like someone is trying to
| teach me what a monad is from the infamous example in
| some old haskell docs.
|
| I'm not proud of my ignorance, and I sure hope that
| eventually if I get it, it'd be very useful for me. At
| least it worked like that for monads.
| pas wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8yHOrloxRA Bela Bauer
| (MS Research) - Fault Tolerant Quantum Computation using
| Majorana-Based Topological Qubits
|
| (note, I have no idea how the braiding happens, or what
| it means, or ... the rest of the fucking owl, but ... the
| part about the local indistinguishability is an important
| part of the puzzle, and why it helps against noise ...
| also have no idea what's the G-factor, but ... also have
| no idea what the s-wave/p-wave superconductors are, but
| ... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/11opcy1/
| comment... ... also ... _phew_ )
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| Based on what i read it seems a lot of algorithmic work is
| required to even make them useful. New algorithms have to
| be discovered and still they will only solve only a special
| class of problems. They cant do classical computing so your
| NVIDIA GPU probably may never be replaced by a Quantum GPU.
| Mithriil wrote:
| Quantum computing is a generalization of classical
| computing. Thus, they CAN do classical computing. But, in
| practice, it'll be not as fast, more error prone and at a
| bigger cost.
| kalastor wrote:
| I wouldn't worry too much about finding new algorithms.
| The sheer power of QC parallelism will attract enough
| talent to convert any useful classical algorithm to QC.
|
| It's a bit similar to the invention of fast Fourier
| transform (was reinvented several times...), O(n log n)
| is so much better than O(n*2) that many problems in
| science and technology use FFT somewhere in their
| pipeline, just because it's so powerful, even if
| unrelated to signal processing. For example,
| multiplication of very large numbers use FFT (?!).
| moffkalast wrote:
| Hopefully not, besides quantum physics simulations the only
| problems they solve are the ones that should remain
| unsolved if we're to trust the integrity of existing
| systems.
|
| As soon as the first practical quantum computer is made
| available, so much recorded TLS encrypted data is gonna get
| turned into plain text, probably destroying millions of
| people's lives. I hope everyone working in quantum research
| is aware of what their work is leading towards, they're not
| much better than arms manufacturers working on the next
| nuke.
| ernesth wrote:
| > last time I checked the record was 80 qubits
|
| It has progressed since: IBM Condor (demonstrated in
| december 2023) has 1121 qubits.
| dwnw wrote:
| which is totally out of touch with the reality of making
| use of the extra qubits they just slapped on the chip to
| get a high number
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Just like fusion energy it is pointless and you are not
| allowed to have excitement about it because some anonymous
| stranger on HN said so.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093939#43094339
| nobankai wrote:
| You're certainly allowed to get excited about it as long as
| you're patient and don't wildly overinflate the realistic
| timeline to net energy production. Similarly, nobody will
| stop you from hyping up quantum computation as long as
| you're not bullshitting usecases or lying about qubit
| scaling.
|
| In the wake of cryptocurrency and AI failing to live up to
| their outrageous levels of hype, many people on this site
| worry that the "feel the AGI" crowd might accidentally
| start feeling some other, seemingly-profitable vaporware to
| overhype and pump.
| stanski wrote:
| Only if you use them in conjunction with an HTML5
| supercomputer. (Sorry, I couldn't resist with Nikola in the
| news again)
| xxs wrote:
| yes, they are useful... as marketing materials. Other than
| that, not at all.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| They can fundamentally break most asymmetric encryption, which
| is a good thing iff you want to do things that require forging
| signatures. Things like jailbreaks Apple can't patch,
| decryption tools that can break all E2E encryption, being able
| to easily steal your neighbor's Facebook login at the coffee
| shop...
|
| Come to think of it, maybe we shouldn't invent quantum
| computers[0].
|
| [0] Yes, even with the upside of permanently jailbreakable
| iPhones.
| Mithriil wrote:
| How the H devices (which they call tetrons) form a qubit is
| explained more thoroughly in their ArXiv article:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12252
| perching_aix wrote:
| Sounds exciting, even though I'm skeptical how far off into the
| future that supposed 1 million qubit chip is.
| light_triad wrote:
| Beyond the marketing value of these types of announcements, how
| much time until consumer grade quantum cloud computing? Years,
| decades?
| layer8 wrote:
| My hunch is somewhere between "decades" and "never".
| layer8 wrote:
| Nature article: https://archive.ph/SM8NQ
| amelius wrote:
| This is why I'm more excited about Microsoft than Apple.
| geodel wrote:
| Agree. Why would I buy Apple M4 macbook when I can have
| Majorana 1 running Windows 11 and install MS Teams to be extra
| productive.
| amelius wrote:
| Well it is not available yet, but Microsoft has industrial
| strength productivity tools (as opposed to Apple's "consumer"
| electronics), and a stellar research department.
| adultSwim wrote:
| They rewrote Teams and it's good now.
| modeless wrote:
| How many qubits on this? One?
| adultSwim wrote:
| Best I can tell is the chip has 8
| radioactivist wrote:
| Whoever decided to make up the non-existent term "topoconductor"
| for the purposes of this article deserves to feel shame and
| embarassment (I say this as a condensed matter physicist).
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Come for the made-up jargon, stay for the horrific PR abuse of
| the English language like "Unlocking quantum's promise"
| pm90 wrote:
| Genuinely curious: in what ways is that not a good term? Is it
| because its not a new thing, just marketing? Or is it
| conflating with some other physics things?
| radioactivist wrote:
| The ideas that underpin their device have been around for
| some time and aren't called by that name in the literature --
| it appears to be entirely a branding exercise. A clear signal
| to me they don't seriously think it is a good name is that
| don't use the name outside this article (it appears nowhere
| in their Nature paper or anywhere else for that matter).
| pinoy420 wrote:
| So what is it called then
| radioactivist wrote:
| It's a topological superconductor.
| Panoramix wrote:
| I skimmed through the paper but nowhere did I find a
| demonstration of a Majorana qubit or a zero mode. The
| achievement was that they demonstrated a single-shot
| measurement. That's nice, but where's the qubit? what did I
| miss?
| radioactivist wrote:
| If you read the referee reports of the Nature paper (they are
| published alongside it) you'll see some referees echoing
| similar points.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Reading the PR release that accompanies a scientific paper
| is a _negative_ information activity. Anything meaningful
| that can actually be supported by the science done is
| _already in the paper_ and if you can understand the paper,
| it will be self evident how you should feel about it.
|
| Any sentence in the press release that isn't VERBATIM in
| the paper should be viewed as marketing, and unsupported by
| the science, and there is zero incentive NOT to lie in the
| PR, especially since the ones writing it are rarely even
| knowledgeable in the subject matter.
| xxs wrote:
| I'd believe a word they say if it can factor 33.
| alliao wrote:
| I just want to acknowledge the general lucidity of this
| community, also finding out I am not insane is bit of a bonus.
| love this community, please don't change
| radioactivist wrote:
| A few things to keep in mind, given how hard of a media push this
| is being given (which should immediately set off alarm bells in
| your head that this might be bullshit)
|
| - Topological phases of matter (similar, but not identical to the
| one discussed here) have been known for decades and were first
| observed experimentally in the 1980s.
|
| - Creating Majorana quasiparticles has a long history of false
| starts and retracted claims (discovery of Majoranas in related
| systems was announced in 2012 and 2018 and both were since
| retracted).
|
| - The quoted Nature paper is about measurements on _one_ qubit.
| One. Not 100, not 1000, a single qubit.
|
| - Unless they think they can scale this up really quickly it
| seems like its a very long (or perhaps non-existent) road to 10^6
| qubits.
|
| - If they could scale it up so quickly, it would have been way
| more convincing to wait a bit (0-2 years) and show a 100 or 1000
| qubit machine that would be comparable to efforts from Google,
| IBM, etc (which have their own problems).
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| The claim/hope is that topological qubits are fault tolerant or
| at least suffer from much lower errors (very roughly you can
| think of topological qubits as an error correction code built
| of the atoms, ie on scale of Avogadro's number). If, for
| example they could build a single qubit even with 10^-6 error
| rates that would in fact put them __ahead__ of all other
| attempts at the path to fault tolerance (but no NISQ).
|
| It is unfortunately unclear how good the topological qubits
| practically are.
| radioactivist wrote:
| I understand the claim and what they are trying to do (and
| they've been trying to do it for 20 years now). It's an
| interesting approach and it is orthogonal enough from other
| efforts that it is absolutely worthwhile to pursue
| scientifically (I'm in an adjacent field in condensed matter
| physics).
|
| But they are doing a full court press in the media
| (professionally produced talking head videos, NYT
| articles/other media, etc, etc) claiming all of those things
| you've just said are right around the corner. And that's
| going to confuse and mislead the public. So there needs to
| push back on what I think is clear bullshit/spin by a company
| trying to sell itself using this development.
| cab404 wrote:
| no shor no upvote
| halosghost wrote:
| Agreed wholesale. Any QC announcement that does not include
| replicable benchmarks for progress executing Shor or Grover (or
| demonstration of another real-world use-case that they actually
| address) should be dismissed out-of-hand by _everyone_ except
| other researchers in QC.
|
| All the best,
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Microsoft really is a pathetic company rnd wise compared to what
| companies of similar size like Bell Labs were at their prime
| cbracketdash wrote:
| To be fair, MSFT was not started as a research company and is
| more of a mass market commercializer of existing technology.
| Bell Labs' primary goal was to _discover_ new science and
| invent practical applications. (Reminds me I should go read
| "The Idea Factory"! (story of bell labs))
|
| IMO new breakthroughs in our understanding of physics would be
| needed first to make substantial progress in QC. As long as
| MSFT isn't investing in attosecond lasers or low temperature
| experiments, RSA will remain secure.
| t-3 wrote:
| Can _any_ modern company be said to be of similar size to Bell
| Labs in it 's prime? Bell Labs were only possible due to a
| monopoly supplying massive amounts of funding for about a
| century. MS had a few decades of domination in the consumer
| desktop OS space, but they always had competition and I would
| be very surprised if they had the kind of revenue streams that
| make this type of long-term investment possible - regular
| payments from nearly every household and business in the
| country, with easy ability to make predictions about current
| and future proceeds just by counting heads.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Short Term - This might be hype. Sure. Getting some Buzz.
|
| Long Term - MS seems pretty committed and serious. Putting in the
| time/money for a long term vision. Maybe a decade from now, we'll
| be bowing down to an all powerful MS God/Oracle/AI.
| ein0p wrote:
| Nadella is currently claiming on X that this opens up a "direct
| path to 1 million qubits". Based on my priors, I put the
| probability of this statement being horseshit at 99.9%. Could
| someone knowledgeable make it 100%?
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| I'm doing theorical research in the topological quantum
| computing.
|
| The idea behind topological quantum computing is to utilize
| quantum materials whose low-energy physics looks like an error
| correcting code. Since these systems are very large (macroscopic
| number of atoms), the error rates are (theoretically) very low,
| ie the qubit is fault tolerant by construction, without any
| additional error correction. In reality, we do not know how good
| these qubits will be at finite temperature, with real life noise,
| etc.
|
| Moreover, these states do not just occur in nature by themselves,
| so their construction requires engineering, and this is what
| Microsoft tries to do.
|
| Unfortunately, Majoranas in nanowires have some history of
| exaggerated claims and data manipulation. Sergey Frolov's [1]
| twitter, one of the people behind original Majorana zero bias
| peaks paper, was my go-to source for that, but it looks like he
| deleted it.
|
| There were also some concerns about previous Microsoft paper
| [2,3] as well as the unusual decision to publish it without the
| details to reproduce it [4].
|
| In my opinion, Microsoft does solid science, it's just the
| problem they're trying to solve is very hard and there are many
| ways in which the results can be misleading. I also think it is
| likely that they are making progress on Majoranas, but I would be
| surprised if they will be able to show quantum memory/single
| qubit gates soon.
|
| [1] https://spinespresso.substack.com/p/has-there-been-enough-
| re...
|
| [2] https://x.com/PhysicsHenry/status/1670184166674112514
|
| [3] https://x.com/PhysicsHenry/status/1892268229139042336
|
| [4]
| https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.107.2...
| klysm wrote:
| I know nothing about quantum computing, but constructing a
| physical system that resembles error correcting codes sounds
| absolutely fascinating.
| r33b33 wrote:
| So when does this break crypto and Bitcoin and how to best
| prepare for this?
|
| Is there any way to secure at all?
| atlanta90210 wrote:
| Great question are people predicting we will have enough
| computing power to "break" bitcoin? How much is needed?
| richwater wrote:
| You just need enough to poison the blockchain
| r33b33 wrote:
| So how to prepare, when?
| einpoklum wrote:
| They can break 1-bit-coin. How's that for ya?
| r33b33 wrote:
| Why isn't crypto crashing?
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