Luiza’s Newsletter

Emerging AI Governance Challenges | Paid Subscriber Edition | #173

This week, Microsoft announced Majorana 1, a quantum chip powered by a new “topological core architecture.” According to Microsoft, this quantum breakthrough will help solve industrial-scale problems in just a few years rather than decades.

From a more technical perspective, the topoconductor (or topological superconductor) is a special category of material that creates a new state of matter: it’s neither solid, liquid, nor gas, but a “topological state.”
(*I highly recommend watching this 12-minute video released by Microsoft to learn more about the science behind it. If you have science-loving kids at home, make sure to watch it with them!)

For those interested in diving deeper into the technical details of Microsoft’s latest announcement, the researchers involved have also published a paper in Nature and a “roadmap to fault-tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays,” which can be found here.