alt Hacker NewsFrom 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...
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breckenedge • last Wednesday at 7:18 PM
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 In fact, there was some controversy over the first attempts to do so, with an early paper having been retracted after a reanalysis of its data showed that the evidence was weaker than had initially been presented.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...
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> 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.