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.
Given that Microsoft has been a heavy research collaborator ( Atom and Quantinuum), is there a possibility that the cross pollination would make it harder to deliver a farcical majorana chip since microsoft isn't all in on their home rolled hardware choice?
I've held the same view that this stuff was sketchy because of the previous mistakes in recent history but I do not work in the field
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.
> 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.
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.
> "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."
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.
yeah, nobody can claim scaling without having the error to prove it. SPAM + coherence time + gate fidelity are the limiting factors to scaling, not the concept of an idea of how to build it at scale :-)
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.
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.
Not saying wild things aren’t possible; designer drug glands grafted on and such would be banger and would alter human lived experience.
Another box measuring oscillations of fundamental forces will not.
Religious fear of “corrupting human nature” keeps smart people scaffolding symbolic logic in machines versus experimenting with weird science. Live, eat, mate, help line go up relative to some musty people’s political ledger, and die is all we’re allowed!
I want drug glands, regenerative tissue, and mini kaiju monstrosities grown in labs… as pets!
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.
