Microsoft's quantum "breakthrough" is still science fiction

Welcome to Runtime! Today: the quantum computing hype train leaves the station once again, this time with Microsoft in the driver's seat, multiple reports outline DOGE's control over computing infrastructure formerly run by official government agencies, and the latest enterprise moves.

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How long must we sing this song

It says something about the current state of the tech industry that people so desperately want to believe quantum computing is about to arrive; maybe it's the promise that an extremely powerful computer could solve all our problems, a genuine desire to be a part of history, or just the urge to find the next get-rich-quick opportunity on the horizon. Whatever it is, Microsoft tapped into that hope Wednesday with the carefully managed rollout of what it described as a major breakthrough in quantum computing research.

Microsoft's quantum chief Chetan Nyack unveiled several updates this week: "the world’s first Quantum Processing Unit," called Majorana 1; the supposed creation of a topological qubit; and a roadmap to building actual quantum computers around the technology that could deliver on decades of promises. "Microsoft intends to build a fault-tolerant prototype based on topological qubits in years, not decades (emphasis theirs)—a crucial acceleration step toward utility-scale quantum computing," the company said in a blog post.

• In the interest of time and space, we're not going to go into a detailed explanation of how qubits and quantum computing (theoretically) work; this explainer from IBM does a pretty good job outlining the basics in plain English.
• Microsoft's approach to quantum computing revolves around topological qubits, "which are expected to be faster, smaller and less prone to losing information than other types of qubits currently under development," Microsoft said in 2022, referring (probably) to IBM and Google's approach.
• The "QPU" consists of "gate-defined devices that combine indium arsenide (a semiconductor) and aluminum (a superconductor)," Microsoft said.
• When cooled to near-absolute zero and magnetized, Microsoft said the chip can create the conditions that lead to "nanowires" that contain something called "Majorana zero modes," which "are the building blocks of our qubits, storing quantum information through ‘parity’—whether the wire contains an even or odd number of electrons."

Microsoft claimed it has put eight topological qubits on Majorana 1, which it acknowledged isn't enough to do anything interesting but the design can supposedly accommodate up to 1 million qubits. However, it's far from clear whether Microsoft actually even built one such topological qubit.

• The company pointed to a technical paper published in Nature backing up its blog post, but that paper only claims that Microsoft has developed the conditions to create such a qubit, not that one has been built.
• "In conclusion, our findings represent substantial progress towards the realization of a topological qubit based on measurement-only operations," Microsoft researchers said in the paper.
• The peer review section accompanying the Nature article was even more circumspect: "The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices."
• And this isn't the first time Microsoft has run into trouble with claims about topological qubits and Majorana zero modes: a 2018 paper claiming many of the same things as Wednesday's had to be retracted after other researchers poked a lot of holes in its argument.

But even if other researchers are able to duplicate Microsoft's claims, this "breakthrough" is more important for Microsoft's unique approach to quantum computing than the development of quantum computing in general. That's according to Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas and a widely followed quantum computing expert.

• "If (emphasis his) Microsoft’s claim stands, then topological qubits have finally reached some sort of parity with where more traditional qubits were 20-30 years ago," Aaronson wrote in a blog post Thursday.
• IBM and Google have already demonstrated designs that can scale into the hundreds or even thousands of qubits, even if right now they are so unreliable at that scale as to be impractical.
• "Topological qubits can win if, and only if, they turn out to be so much more reliable that they leapfrog the earlier approaches—sort of like the transistor did to the vacuum tube and electromechanical relay. Whether that will happen is still an open question, to put it extremely mildly," Aaronson wrote.
• All the years combine, and at some point they become decades.

Much chaos, so dumb

Elon Musk's DOGE drones continued to demand access to some of the federal government's more sensitive information this week, and for the most part they're getting what they want. The Atlantic reported Wednesday that DOGE now has total control over all of USAID's servers, and is gunning for the same level of access to the CDC and the FAA while one of those racist rapscallions "appears to be working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government."

However, the Washington Post reported Thursday that the White House and the Treasury Department had agreed to limit Databricks employee Gavin Kliger to read-only access when it comes to taxpayer data stored by the IRS. Over the weekend, DOGE "requested broad access to the most sensitive IRS data systems, which would have given Kliger the ability to see and in some cases edit detailed information — including bank accounts, payment balances, Social Security and other personal identification numbers and, in some instances, medical information — on virtually every individual, business and nonprofit in the country," but he'll now only have "the same access granted to academic researchers and IT professionals who work on IRS systems," according to the report.

DOGE's true motivations beyond, just like, breaking stuff, remain unclear, but it's starting to feel like Elon Musk wants to train an AI model on an enormous and extremely sensitive repository of data that none of his competitors can touch. The group "is also attempting to gain access to Social Security Administration datasets, which include the world’s largest repository of medical data and years of history on social safety net payments and employment histories," The Post reported. 

Enterprise moves

Bela Stepanova is the new chief product officer at Apollo, joining the sales-management software company after similar stints at Iterable and Box.

Andrew Travis is the new chief revenue officer at Foxit, a promotion after several years in sales leadership roles at the document and electronic signatures company.

The Runtime roundup

Dwarkesh Patel posted an extremely interesting interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella designed to highlight the quantum "breakthrough," but it also covered Nadella's views on AGI (lol), AI model providers (enterprises want competition), and a lot more.

Amazon is shutting down Chime, the online meeting service that you would have only ever encountered if you had worked for Amazon or had to interview somebody there, and will now use Zoom as its internal meeting tool, according to Business Insider.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!