Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily news and commentary show, guest-hosted by Acceleration Economy practitioner analyst and CIO Kenny Mullican. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the Cloud.
In this episode, Kenny puts quantum computing developments from Microsoft in perspective.
This episode is sponsored by “Selling to the New Executive Buying Committee,” an Acceleration Economy Course designed to help vendors, partners, and buyers understand the shifting sands of how mid-market and enterprise CXOs are making purchase decisions to modernize technology.
Highlights
01:02 — Kenny starts with an explanation of “qubits,” or quantum bits. Regular computers use bits (zero or one) to process information. Qubits are a quantum version of regular bits: they can be in a state that is zero, one, or both at the same time. This is what gives quantum computers their potential for immense computational power. The downside: qubits are delicate and easily disturbed by their surroundings; these disturbances, or noise, can cause computation errors.
01:54 — To overcome this issue, scientists came up with the idea of logical qubits, which are formed by grouping several physical qubits together and using quantum error correction techniques. Even if one or two of the physical qubits in the group get disrupted or noisy, the qubit remains reliable.
02:32 — With regard to quantum hardware, the industry defines three levels of quantum computers.
- Level one, foundational, runs on noisy physical qubits. Quantum computers created thus far are in this category
- Level two, resilient, runs on reliable logical qubits
- Level three, scale, are quantum supercomputers that can solve problems that even the msot powerful non-quantum supercomputers can’t. .
03:23 — It’s estimated that hundreds or even thousands of physical qubits may be needed to form a single logical qubit depending on the error rates of the physical qubits and the specifics of the error correction code used.
03:40 — One of the ways scientists have been trying to solve this problem is through something called a Majorana quasiparticle. Scientists think Majorana quasiparticles could be used to create a new kind of qubit that is less sensitive to environmental noise, produces fewer errors, and wouldn’t need as much error correction. This could result in more stable, reliable quantum computers.
04:50 — Microsoft has presented peer-reviewed data in a journal by the American Physical Society showing it can create and control Majorana quasiparticles and is thus on its way to engineering a reliable, hardware-protected qubit and operating in the second category cited above. This is big news.
05:46 — The company also announced two new products. Azure Quantum Elements will provide access to Microsoft quantum computing resources to developers who’ll be able to start experimenting with level-one systems. This is important because previously you needed your own quantum computers to use the technology, while Microsoft is now making it available through APIs.
06:12 — The second product is Copilot in Azure Quantum, which is what Microsoft calls natural language processing that’s taken advantage of large language model artificial intelligence (AI) systems including ChatGPT. This Copilot will help scientists use natural language to reason through complex chemistry and material science problems using quantum computing.
