Researchers at Microsoft, with support from DARPA, say they’ve designed a quantum computer chip that could lead to artificial-intelligence tools that use far fewer computer resources and energy.
According to a Microsoft blog on the announcement and their accompanying paper, the team has developed a new way to check the state of a quantum computation without disrupting the delicate information underlying it. This technique, called interferometric single-shot parity measurement, was tested using a special combination of indium arsenide and aluminum, or InAs–Al. They’ve used that to create a chip, the Majorana 1, which Microsoft described as “the world’s first Quantum Processing Unit, QPU, powered by a topological core, designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip.”
In simple terms, the method allows scientists to determine whether two quantum bits (qubits) are in the same state or different states—kind of like checking if two spinning coins landed on the same side—without looking at them directly. This is important because traditional ways of measuring qubits can disturb them, simply because observing or measuring processes at the quantum level can change the process or phenomenon being observed. making quantum calculations less reliable.
The breakthrough would be especially useful for a type of quantum computing called topological quantum computation, which is designed to be more stable and resistant to errors. In this approach, information is stored in a way that makes it harder to lose due to tiny changes in the environment, a major challenge for quantum computers. If successfully implemented on a larger scale, this technique could help make quantum computers more reliable and easier to build. The paper provides a measurement technique that Microsoft’ has integrated into Majorana 1.
Quantum chips could have big implications for artificial intelligence as they allow for the processing of very large amounts of data in parallel, taking far less time and using fewer computer resources than traditional methods. For instance if you want to scale a computer running on highly advanced NVIDIA H100 GPUs, you would need to add more and more GPUs, leading to a linear increase in both performance and energy consumption. But a 10,000-qubit quantum computer could perform specific tasks with far less energy than traditional supercomputers.
That has relevance to the military, whose future operating environments will feature heavy electro-magnetic-spectrum warfare. Among other things, that means drones will need more onboard computing capability so they can analyze surveillance and intelligence data and make decisions autonomously. Quantum machine learning applied to encryption and security could render many classic encryption obsolete. And there are also potential applications in running large language models with far fewer computers and much less data—hence the support from DARPA under its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, or QBI.
But Microsoft and others say that the nearest-term applications will blend traditional computing processes with quantum ones.
“This is truly an advance for the industry: building a custom chip that uses topological qubits which many consider extremely useful for scaling to powerful quantum computers. The announcement reinforces our assessment that fault-tolerant quantum hardware is closer than many business leaders think,” Markus Pflitsch, founder and CEO of Terra Quantum, said in a statement.
Of course, quantum breakthroughs don’t always turn out to be exactly what they seem, and the idea of measuring something without measuring it directly opens further questions into what exactly is being measured? The Microsoft announcement doesn’t include many of the specific technical details that might nominally accompany such breakthroughs but, according to Nature, the researchers did provide some experts with a bit more information at a closed-door meeting in California.
One of the attendees, a University of Oxford theoretical physicist Steven Simon, told the journal, “Would I bet my life that they’re seeing what they think they’re seeing? No, but it looks pretty good.”
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