The quantum computer hype
After a long delay while working on a big article, here’s a small one.
I just realized the quantum computer hype reached a new level when preparing slides for a presentation I gave yesterday. The presentation is part of a cryptography training organized by The Radboud University, in collaboration with the Dutch Banking Association (NVB).
My contribution to this course is the part on “all things quantum”, where I explain about quantum cryptography, quantum computers and post-quantum cryptography (PQC).
To show to the students what is the level of the hype, I googled “quantum computer breakthrough” to make a slide with current developments. The result was unbelievable. In a matter of minutes I found five companies that claimed to have made a breakthrough in quantum computing only last week! You would think this is a case of major company espionage, or maybe an extreme coincidence. But I think it shows another effect: the need to publish. (More on this below.)
I just did the experiment again, and spent a bit more time researching the stories. Here are seven news items that are (claimed to be) breakthroughs from this week, with some comments from me.
- Technology magazine announces “Microsoft’s Quantum Computing Breakthrough: Majorana 1” on Microsoft’s new chip.
New Scientist (a news source I tend to trust) already published a few weeks ago that physicists are not impressed by this chip. - The Brighter Side announces “Breakthrough quantum computer unlocks hidden world of elementary particles”. Scientists from the Universities of Innsbruck and Waterloo cooperated to use a simulated quantum computer to simulate a simplified (2D) version of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). No quantum computer was involved.
- PRNewsWire announces “Quantum Breakthrough: Proof of Wavefunction Collapse on Superconducting Quantum Computer Supports Penrose-Hameroff Consciousness Theory”. The article says they claim this could “explain consciousness” by “solving the puzzle of Schrödingers cat”. (Schrödingers cat is thought experiment, not a puzzle, and no solution is needed.)
As if the hype isn’t big enough, they explain that “several LLMs were used in parallel to solve the problem, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7 & Code, Google’s Gemini 2.5, xAI’s Grok 3, and IBM’s Granite-Qiskit”. How about using blockchains? - SciTechDaily talks about The Exotic Particle That Might Finally Make Quantum Computers Reliable where they claim that “scientists achieved greater separation of MZMs” by using “carefully engineered three-site Kitaev chains”. MZMs are Majorana Zero Modes, but you knew that already, of course.
In fact, the original claim for Majorana particles has been retracted, but apparently the research on these elusive particles continues regardless. - Reddit annouces that A JPMorgan-backed experiment used quantum hardware to generate certified randomness. I have seen such a quantum random generator a few years ago already. In fact, a cryptographic random number generator produces certified random numbers much faster for much less cost. And if you want true quantum randomness, use a Zener diode: they are very cheap.
- the Debrief announces a Breakthrough in Quantum Magnetism Simulation Marks Turning Point for Quantum Computing where Quantinuum says that a new study in collaboration with Caltech, Fermioniq, EPFL, and the Technical University of Munich allowed to “simulate a notoriously difficult system — quantum magnetism — in a way that pushes beyond what classical computers can reliably achieve”. The article is almost impossible to read, but it means that they solve a problem with their device that is hard to solve on a regular computer. Quantiuum published this a month ago, by the way.
One important detail is missing from the story: the problem they solve is not interesting. The relevance of this is nicely explained in this video on the teapot problem. - Nature (a reliable “old” news source for a change) published “Meet ‘qudits’: more complex cousins of qubits boost quantum computing”. This shows (using simulations of quantum computers) that the two-valued qubits could be replaced with three- and four-valued things, without changing the quantum computer hardware. If that is useful for anything is not clear.
What is going on!?
There are a few things going on here.
- First, thanks to the enshittification of the internet, and accelerated by Large Language Models that spit out reams of text at no effort, the quality of news is pretty low lately. This results in old news being repeated, absurd claims, very big headlines and makes it hard to find actual news.
- Second, the researchers themselves are faced with a hard problem. They get millions of funding, with which they build a device that cannot compute anything, but is called a “quantum computer” because that’s what the sponsors say it is. Now the sponsors ask them to show what it does, so they have to write an article. But because there are competing research groups, they are expected to have something better than the competition. They have no choice than to blow up their results.
- This is all driven by our brains that are continuously looking for new information, sometimes even resulting in “information addiction disorder”.
The result of this is an endless stream of hyped news where “breakthroughs” are published. I wonder what happens if an actual breakthrough is achieved. Maybe noone will notice anymore.
What now?
I promise that if there actually is a breakthrough, I’ll let you know.
The actual situation is that there still is no “quantum computer” in the sense of a machine that can perform a useful computation. The multimillion machine we see on the news are the equivalents of electronics breadboards for making simple circuits (but not as powerful).
Further reading
If you want to hear from someone else, here’s a nuanced article from Steven Boykey Sidley that jumps on the Microsoft announcement.
I myself have written before on what to do about the quantum computer, if you are interested.
And if you like to see more hype, enjoy this hilarious video.