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Just when you thought the AI race was too much to keep up with, Microsoft shot back with a quantum win.
The company launched a new quantum computing chip yesterday, using technology the company calls “topological qubits”, which makes quantum computing more stable.
The latest chip is called Majorana 1, and here’s how it looks.
The deets: Quantum computers work differently from regular computers. Instead of bits that are either 0 or 1, quantum computers use qubits, which can be both 0 and 1 at the same time, unlocking greater computing power.
But there’s a catch: qubits are fragile and extremely error-prone.
Today, companies like Google and IBM have focused on fixing this problem by stacking more qubits together and correcting the errors as they happen. This approach hasn’t been that successful so far.
Microsoft is flipping the script. Instead of fixing errors after they happen, it’s designing qubits that are naturally more resistant to errors in the first place.
Majorana 1, currently houses eight qubits but is designed to scale up to one million, a number that could make practical quantum applications possible.
Why it matters: Right now, quantum computing is mostly a research experiment, it’s useful for theoretical problems but not yet practical for everyday industries.
- If you’re curious, there’s roughly 4 quantum pure play stocks listed in the US. Combined, they have a $15B or so market cap, and not much to show for it.
