Quantum computing announcements are rolling in thick and fast - and more than a few people seem to have fallen for the carefully worded press releases. Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Majorana, last week we saw announcements of Amazon Web Services (AWS) "Ocelot" and PsiQuantum's "Omega" hardware, with talk of mass manufacturing, scaling to millions of qubits and more.
However, a hint: if it just says something "contains the components required to build million-qubit-scale quantum computers" there might still be a while before they actually build such a computer 😉
The actual technical announcements and scientific papers behind the press releases describe some exciting innovations and advances, but it is clear there is a long way to go, with the actual hardware produced to date containing just a few qubits - or in the case of Microsoft's Majorana, at best(*) they have only produced a single topological qubit device so far.
It's still my view that we are still a long way from knowing what the "best" qubit technology will be. If anything, the field is widening rather than narrowing, with Microsoft making topological qubits more credible, and AWS introducing a new type of "cat" superconducting qubit.
The really interesting news is that the focus appears to be changing to finding ways of making "better" qubits before making more of them, ie better quality, less susceptible to noise, and finding ways of error correction. This will be vital to scaling quantum computing - an gate operation accuracy of 99.99% might sound impressive, but if you need to do 10,000 such operations you have >60% chance of getting the wrong answer at the end - not very useful!
I am looking forward to more exciting developments throughout this "Year of Quantum", though I may need to get better at speed-reading physics papers...
(*) The published paper simply says they have measurement results that are consistent with having created a topological qubit. A few years ago Microsoft made some similar claims that were subsequently withdrawn due to concerns over lack of evidence. Presumably the latest claim has learnt from that embarrassment and they have strong confidence in interpreting their results this time round.
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