Microsoft is pouring billions into a quantum computer, and the man in charge of that bet has a message for the scientists who doubt his team’s biggest claim: he doesn’t care.
The claim in question is a genuine holy grail. Last year, Zulfi Alam’s group said it had effectively split an electron into so-called Majorana quasiparticles — exotic states first hypothesized nearly 90 years ago and never convincingly pinned down since. If real, they could form the backbone of a uniquely stable qubit. If not, they’re just noise dressed up as a breakthrough.
A lot of physicists suspect the latter. Microsoft’s research papers, critics say, lean on inconclusive data, and much of the work never went through peer review. Independent researchers couldn’t rule out that ordinary physical phenomena were producing the signals Microsoft interpreted as Majorana particles. This isn’t the company’s first stumble here, either: back in 2021, Microsoft retracted a quantum paper from Nature after outside physicists tore holes in the data analysis.
Alam’s response to all of this? A chuckle and an “I don’t really care.”
To be fair, Microsoft has kept moving. In June the company said it had produced a qubit 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, crediting its scientific-discovery AI agent for part of the work. But the Majorana foundation under that milestone is still contested — largely because Microsoft won’t release the raw data. “Why should I?” Alam asks, citing commercial sensitivity.
He also has a beef with the entire scientific publishing machine. A Nature paper published in June, he notes, was based on work done two years earlier. “The world has changed in two years, so this notion of having peer reviews and publications doesn’t work in this fast-moving world right now,” he says, adding that there simply aren’t enough experts to speed the process up. “That’s why this paper thing is kind of boring now.”
Other people in the field aren’t buying the excuse. Trevor Lanting, chief development officer at Nasdaq-listed D-Wave Quantum — a company that has faced its own accusations of overstating results — argues the expertise to check these claims exists well beyond corporate labs.
- Independent evaluation, he says, is “part of the healthy process” of building a real technical foundation.
- His blunter read: when a group says it doesn’t have time for scrutiny, that often means “our results aren’t strong enough to stand up to that scrutiny.”
Microsoft is one of several giants and startups chasing commercially useful quantum machines, with rivals betting on neutral atoms, charged atoms and light instead of Majorana particles. Alam is unmoved by the criticism — he’d rather let the hardware settle the argument. Microsoft has said it will deliver a useful quantum computer by 2029.
The skepticism, he insists, only helps. “It motivates us to be even faster,” he says, “because our mission is black-and-white: Get this machine up and let the machine do the work.”
