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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, February 25th. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. Last week, Microsoft researchers announced an approach to quantum computing that the company claimed involved the creation of a new state of matter, not liquid, gas, or solid. That followed Google in December, touting its own breakthrough in quantum chip design. Both scientific advances were followed by a surge in quantum-related stock prices.
But what is quantum computing? And what exactly are researchers and investors betting it can do? Here to give us a primer on quantum computing and take us through some of the potential real-world applications of the tech is WSJ reporter Asa Fitch. All right, Asa, we've talked about this before on the show, but it's worth recapping for listeners given the recent news.
What is a quantum computer? So a quantum computer is in a way like a normal computer that you and I use every day. Those computers use something called bits. There's a bunch of little on-off switches that when you combine them together do different things like add things up or tell your computer what to display on a screen. And then you have a quantum computer that you can use to do things like
But a quantum computer uses something called a qubit. And a qubit is a bit different from a bit. It's not a regular on-off switch. It can have an on state or an off state, but it can be sort of a mixture of both of those things at the same time, which creates some interesting features.
Because of the way these things interact with each other, they can contain more information at a single point in time. So they can figure out all the possibilities for something. Because it's able to do this kind of fast calculation and fast combination of things and simulation of things, it can do that much, much faster than your average computer these days. Think of it as like you're trying to unlock a door and you need to find the right combination or whatever. And if you have a system that could try a bunch of things at the same time, it's
you'd get there faster than if you had to go through every single iteration. We mentioned Google and Microsoft. What are some of the other companies exploring quantum computing? IBM has explored quantum for a very long time. You have a bunch of smaller companies like IonQ, D-Wave, etc., that have come up in recent years. Some of those are listed companies these days. A lot of people see promise in quantum computing. They see it as something that could lead to new, better drugs, for example.
things like physical simulations of the world that are quite complex. And so you'd have like better batteries. For example, that's one of the ideas people have that it could do. So there are a lot of great applications. There are a lot of companies that have come up to try to harness this thing. So we talked a little bit about how it works. But in order to help us with scale, what can quantum do that a regular supercomputer can't?
One of the big ones is drug discovery. You know, you're trying to figure out combinations of proteins and other things like that that result in drugs that cure serious diseases. You got to try a lot of things, right? And so trying a lot of things means you
in a computational sense, you've got to simulate a lot of things, a lot of variables moving at the same time. And there have been, of course, for many, many years, efforts to do this using regular computers, and those have been successful, but they take a long time. The promise with quantum is that it could just take much less time to figure out these simulations, to solve these problems, and thus to create new drugs. How much less time? If you look at some of the comparisons on quantum equations...
and how long it takes current computers to solve them versus quantum computers to solve them. In one benchmark last year, Google said it took 24 septillion years for a regular computer to solve an equation that took their quantum computer five minutes or something like that to solve. So you get a sense of what the scale is when you hear something like that. So 10 septillion is a 10 with 24 zeros. So a long time.
Coming up, Microsoft researchers say they created a chip that leverages a new state of matter. What it is and what it could mean for the future of quantum computing. That's after the break. The PC gave us computing power at home. The internet connected us and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift.
a new podcast for Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Etlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So last week, Microsoft researchers said they created a chip that leverages a new state of matter, not a liquid, a solid, or a gas. Fill me in on this because I don't quite understand.
The basic idea is they claim to have created what they call a topological superconductor. It's basically a little tiny thing that allows them to do quantum computing in a way that hadn't been possible in the past, if you believe what they've claimed. And they say that they're actually able to scale up the qubits and make them quite large.
large quite fast. They were talking about a million, potentially a billion qubits on a single chip, which would be absolutely unheard of. Today's most advanced quantum computers have numbers of qubits in the thousands, and that's really pushing it. Above a thousand qubits these days is pretty big. So
If, and there's a big if, and there's a lot of skepticism about this, if it pans out, it could be big for quantum going forward. What are these researchers basing this on? What's the evidence they're using here? They've published their paper in Nature, of course, the famous scientific journal. But some physicists have questioned the viability of these claims, the big quantum computer being created out of these things.
You know, it's part of the natural cycle of scientific discovery and the testing of the claims that people make. It's certainly not a sure thing in a couple of dimensions. I mean, there's questions about their research and like whether it actually is going to do what they say it can do. And then there's the question of how do you actually practically do this? Right now, this is a science project. It's not a real thing. How do you take that science project and make it a commercially viable quantum computer that
anybody off the street could come and use. That's the real question. And we're very, very far from there being something like that. Why is this new state of matter important to quantum computing? It's basically just a lot of engineering that creates a new state of matter that's able to do things with quantum bits and their claims, I guess, that we weren't able to do before. You're chilling things to absolute zero. Many quantum strategies involve, or almost all of them really, in
cooling something to near absolute zero to stabilize things and allow them to measure things on a sort of quantum level. There's a lot of noise that comes out when you start to scale up a quantum computer with many qubits, and that's been a big issue for people, and they have confidence that they can reduce those errors and really make it work. They're able to zero in on a quantum bit and
Let's say it's successful and becomes commercially viable.
What are the potential dangers of successful and widespread quantum computing based on your reporting? One is that a very good quantum computer could potentially crack a lot of today's encryption, which would be bad for people who want to encrypt data and privacy. But I mean, the good news there is that people are well aware of this problem.
and there's still a lot of time to solve the problem before it really becomes an issue. There's a lot of preparation going on to develop encryption methods that are quote-unquote quantum-proof, so that if there were a big quantum computer system,
it still wouldn't be able to solve that kind of encryption or break that encryption. All right. It sounds like it's still early days for this tech, but how soon can we start seeing some of the business potential from quantum computing? For quantum to become as ubiquitous as regular computing is, it might never happen. But for it to become a sort of useful scientific tool or
that people use in business. You ask different people, they have different views on it. But on the optimistic side, people would say in the next several years. And then if you ask the pessimists, they'd say the next couple of decades, potentially. It's clear that more and more powerful quantum computers are being developed, but it could be a long time. That was WSJ reporter Asa Fitch. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter with supervising producer Catherine Milsop.
I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.