Comment by EvgeniyZh
3 days ago
The claim/hope is that topological qubits are fault tolerant or at least suffer from much lower errors (very roughly you can think of topological qubits as an error correction code built of the atoms, ie on scale of Avogadro's number). If, for example they could build a single qubit even with 10^-6 error rates that would in fact put them __ahead__ of all other attempts at the path to fault tolerance (but no NISQ).
It is unfortunately unclear how good the topological qubits practically are.
I understand the claim and what they are trying to do (and they've been trying to do it for 20 years now). It's an interesting approach and it is orthogonal enough from other efforts that it is absolutely worthwhile to pursue scientifically (I'm in an adjacent field in condensed matter physics).
But they are doing a full court press in the media (professionally produced talking head videos, NYT articles/other media, etc, etc) claiming all of those things you've just said are right around the corner. And that's going to confuse and mislead the public. So there needs to push back on what I think is clear bullshit/spin by a company trying to sell itself using this development.
That's fair, and I don't like their marketing too (and others too, look how the reviewers pushed back on misleading claims in the paper). I was talking specifically on Majoranas being behind sc/trapped ions/cold atoms. If they manage to make 1 and 2 qubit gates and it will have good error rates in couple of years (and that's a big if), they'll be approximately where for example Google is expected to be. And the question what will be easier to scale is very unclear and will decide who wins eventually