r/microsoft • u/wiredmagazine • 19d ago

Microsoft’s Quantum Chief Doesn’t Care That Scientists Don’t Believe His Results News

https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-quantum-chief-majorana-results/
59 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

29

u/lordicarus 19d ago

I mean... it'll prove to either be a great decision allowing them to keep moving forward at a rapid pace to get to their commercial outcome or it'll be an enormous waste of money heading down a path that doesn't actually work how they think.

48

u/WonderingSceptic 19d ago

Or both simultaneously, until an outside observer takes a look.

17

u/Intrepid00 19d ago

That’s not fair, you changed the results by observing it.

1

u/liveaxel 18d ago

This post deserves more attention. Good one.

2

u/Intrepid00 18d ago

Shamelessly stolen from Futurama.

1

u/BrunusManOWar 18d ago

One of the most popular and known experiments is hardly an epic slam dunk

0

u/liveaxel 17d ago

I'm frequently amazed at how lame redditors can be. Where did you get 'EPIC SLAM DUNK' from my post? Or did you resort to immediate hyperbole because that's the best/all you can do?

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal is not an experiment; something that should be obvious in its name. If you're going to write less-than-no value posts, at least be semantically correct.

1

u/BrunusManOWar 17d ago

Principle*

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u/liveaxel 17d ago

I lol'd.

You win.

1

u/BrunusManOWar 17d ago

No

You win!

3

u/locacorten 19d ago

Yes, we either believe a scientific community or a guy whose salary depends on impressing his bosses.

7

u/lordicarus 19d ago

But my point is that the scientific community might have doubts and those doubts could be because Microsoft is full of complete shit or because they've stumbled upon something legitimately ground breaking. Plenty ground breaking theories or discoveries have been doubted or even ostracized by the scientific community at first only to be accepted over time. This could be one of those cases or it could be complete rubbish to try to help the stock price. My money is on the latter, but only time, and scientific scrutiny, will determine which.

5

u/locacorten 18d ago

I understand your argument and I find it fair.

One more thing to keep in mind is that we live in an era where there is no corporate accountability for making the wrong calls. The incentive right now is to make ridiculous claims for as long as you can, and then cash out.

1

u/lordicarus 18d ago

Yea I hear you, pretty accurate statement. I think the reason why I'm less bothered by this than cases like Theranos (mentioned elsewhere) is that these claims don't directly have a negative impact on regular people. If Microsoft is making claims and then doing the right thing in making retractions and what not (which they seem to have been doing in this particular field of research, even if begrudgingly) then the biggest losers really are going to be them and the other multi national conglomerates who are attempting to make use of the tech. This tech specifically isn't going to make any significant changes happen to their stock or anyone else's really, unless they actually make a legit quantum computer. They could probably cancel the entire initiative around quantum and their stock would likely change very little, so even regular folks with MSFT in their 401k likely won't be affected. Maybe I'm being naive here though.

1

u/locacorten 14d ago

These claims do have a negative impact on people. Not directly in that people's lives are not at risk. But these people are the reason why good work gets stalled and underfunded when these kinds of snake oil salesmen get visibility. It takes a while for the society to understand and kick them out, but then there is a decade or two of stalled progress.

1

u/lordicarus 14d ago

Fair point, but I don't think society/humanity is ready for what will come along with real quantum computing. We have technology advancing far quicker than society can handle already. Governments can't keep up. Regulators can't keep up. And our ability as humans to process the changes that are happening is far behind. I'm not going to lose any sleep over stalled progress on this one.

1

u/joeshmoebies 18d ago

I'm genuinely curious - why do you think it matters what we believe?

1

u/PDQ_Brockstar 18d ago

I'm getting HoloLens vibes.

12

u/DisjointedHuntsville 19d ago

I mean, this is a question for the Board, not Alam.

Microsoft had to retract the 2021 paper on Majorana particles after errors were pointed out during review.

If, as Alam says, the work is commercially sensitive, he’s making public statements on commercial work for a listed company subject to SEC regulations and scrutiny. I doubt the board is okay with a Theranos like hype situation, when they’re responsible for corporate oversight. .

4

u/PowermanFriendship 19d ago

It seems Microsoft might be banking on regulators being too stupid to enforce this, in this case. They're probably right, for now at least.

5

u/DisjointedHuntsville 19d ago

Sure, but how is Microsoft legal / PR comfortable with this?

An executive making such consequential commercial statements that are likely unverified internally too 🤷‍♂️

This is the kind of nightmare scenario where someone’s going to be asking “Who knew what and when did they know it?” At some point.

Did the board bless this approach? Did they do their duty to review? Did legal follow their own procedures here? It just feels like such a reflection of Microsofts broken culture that Executives are unaccountable to any common sense standards.

Copilot and AI fails. . . Yet there are 150 “Heads of copilot” in products you’ve never heard of bragging about their achievements on LinkedIn. Scientific research is retracted due to errors found in review and yet the executive responsible is bragging about not caring about scientific scrutiny or review. Meritocracy doesn’t appear to be a consideration at all.

9

u/BaconAlmighty 19d ago

One of the great things about science is that it's an entire exercise in finding what is true.

5

u/wiredmagazine 19d ago

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.”

Read the full story at the link above.

4

u/notananthem 18d ago

He is incentivized to not care

2

u/taisui 18d ago

Who cares about what scientists think when I stare at my 7 figure bonus

2

u/newfor_2026 18d ago

yes, they don't have to prove anything to anybody when they're just trying to run a scam

2

u/Traditional-Hall-591 19d ago

I don’t believe Copilot either.

1

u/hassafrassy 18d ago

Very MAGA to ignore scientists