Microsoft’s Quantum Chief Doesn’t Care That Scientists Don’t Believe His Results
The man leading Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar scheme to build a quantum computer says he isn’t interested in appeasing scientists.
When Zulfi Alam’s team claimed last year to have effectively split an electron into so-called Majorana quasiparticles in its bid to reinvent computing, some scientists simply didn’t believe the software giant. They cited inconclusive data in Microsoft’s research papers and the lack of peer-review analysis for many of the results. But Alam, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of quantum, tells WIRED with a chuckle, “I don’t really care.”
Microsoft is one of several tech powerhouses racing alongside a raft of startups to build commercially useful quantum computers. The goal for these companies is to create computers that could solve currently impossible problems in fields from drug development to defense by exploiting quantum mechanics to process units of information, known as bits, in a fundamentally different way than how classical machines do. (There...
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