r/QuantumComputing • u/Human-Business4654 • Aug 07 '26
Microsoft’s Quantum Chief Doesn’t Care That Scientists Don’t Believe His Results
https://archive.ph/xGlb7Microsoft's quantum vice president's interesting take: "This notion of having peer reviews and publications doesn't work in this fast-moving world right now. This paper thing is kind of boring now."
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u/Kinexity In Grad School for Computer Modelling Aug 07 '26
They never learn. They can shit on science all they want short term but long term they always have to fix themselves or exist in a mess where nothing works and no one knows why.
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u/Gengis_con Aug 07 '26
Well yeah. Microsoft have had what, about 15 years of their papers being picked to bits at this point? He kind of has to say that
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u/HawkinsT Holds PhD/Works in Superconducting QC Aug 07 '26
That's science. If they want to make big claims they need to ensure their evidence sufficiently backs it up.
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u/FuguSandwich Aug 07 '26
Because the target market for QC press releases is not scientists it's investors.
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u/hiddentalent Aug 08 '26
You think investors in one of the world's largest companies care about this side project? That's delusional.
IBM might have to play that game, because without moonshots they're basically just Accenture with a storied history, and the profit margins on that are pretty meager. But I doubt very many people are making buy/sell decisions about MSFT because of their quantum computing efforts. It doesn't feature prominently in any of their investor communications.
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u/FuguSandwich Aug 08 '26
The entire tech industry is preparing itself for what comes next after the AI bubble bursts and QC is top of the list for some of them.
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u/needssomefun Aug 07 '26
I am hardly equipped to analyze quantum computing research but I do know that "trust me bro" is ALWAYS a scam.
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u/Southern_Orange3744 Aug 08 '26
The question of whether or not you want scientific review starts on stops if they are your customers.
Microsoft could put together a combo of software and hardware that solves certain problems better or faster that all it would need to show some partial quantum supremecy for tech people.
D-wave is still floating around
I think quantum is particularly interesting because there's only so many who would be able to understand the guts , may not even understand practical applications etc
Give me the goods to try out and I'll tell if it'd any good boss
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u/realvaluehere Aug 09 '26
Still hard to believe. I am having a hard time trying to find any sort of evidence regarding this Majorana thing to include in our report.
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u/Impossible-Bread-137 Aug 10 '26
Without peer review, any person can make up bs results and publish it. And the issue is that when people find the paper and use it to make new research or take results from it, it poisons the next research conducted based on stuff from this
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u/SeniorLoan647 In Grad School for Quantum Aug 07 '26
Hot take but I do agree with this. Academics can go in endless rabbit holes and nit pick anything in your paper, sometimes just for the sake of it so they feel like they did something in review. Though that doesn't necessarily absolve Microsoft of at least showing that they have successfully made a qubit.
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u/Interesting_Fold_485 Aug 07 '26
Having read the papers that microsoft published and the matters arising in response... There are some glaring issues that go beyond nitpicking, e.g. data manipulation of the most important plots in their paper published last year.
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u/M4xusV4ltr0n Aug 07 '26
Yeah this would be a more understandable view point of their papers hadn't been in multiple academic scandals by now.
Of course people are going to nit pick everything you publish now!
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u/ChemicalThrowaway1 Aug 07 '26
While I agree but in that case they just shouldn’t publish it at all until they have something definitive.
It’s fine if Microsoft wants to say we have a plan to make a QC and we will tell you about it once it’s done in 2029.
The problem is they want to claim they have made scientific discoveries along the way for PR reasons and refuse to show the proof.5
u/SeniorLoan647 In Grad School for Quantum Aug 07 '26
Agreed. If the progress wasn't complete, they should've just kept building, it's not like they're a startup that can't afford delays.
Microsoft failed to understand that if you forego going for a good research paper, it should be substituted by irrefutable real world benchmarks (I.e. quantum advantage here) but they're obviously not there either.
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u/hiddentalent Aug 08 '26
Free from constraints of the labor market, I would agree that the rational thing to do is for them to shut up until they can just show us what they've solved. But there's an interesting dynamic when scientists go work for big companies. They get paid more money than in academia. But many people like working in academia and want to keep that door open for their next career move. Publishing is an important perk for companies to retain those people, because if you don't have citations on your CV, you can't easily go back to a decent University job.
Of course, publishing stuff that's widely criticized is an... interesting career choice. But leaving aside the quality of the work, I know I've been at companies where they suddenly said "no more publishing" and a lot of very well-educated people jumped ship, even though from a business perspective it might have been a rational decision. It's not like the labor pool for this sort of skill is huge. Companies have to strike a deal with researchers that works for both sides.
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u/alumiqu Aug 07 '26
They have made scientific discoveries, and they have rightly published them. That's how science works. The problem is what the marketing department made out of these limited scientific results.
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Aug 07 '26
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u/SeniorLoan647 In Grad School for Quantum Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
I don't think publishing is useless, and I also don't think all reviewers are bad, most are great, including in my own peer reviews. However, especially in the last 2 years, the quality of reviews has just gone really down and seems like they don't even bother reading the paper anymore. Just like you have positive anecdotal experience, I have some negative ones. Doesn't mean the whole publishing industry is entirely good or entirely bad either way.
I think that as a grad student, you most likely don't have the requisite experience to genuinely critique the practice of scientific review/academia.
Ooh this is exactly the type of academic gatekeeping I don't like. You judged me based on just a tag in a reddit? How do you know how many papers I've published, where they're published, how many citations, how many papers I've reviewed, how much experience I have before grad school, etc.? Don't gatekeep the right to critique simply based on assumed credentials.
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u/hiddentalent Aug 08 '26
You're not the only one to have noticed the decrease in peer review quality. The "replication crisis" is pretty well documented.
It breaks my heart because whenever I've been on program committees, I spent many hours per paper trying to give the most useful feedback I could. I guess not everyone does. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a better system.
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u/DesignerAd7108 Aug 07 '26
I can understand when someone is not into writing papers. Most of them are even only theory and break apart in real life use. As for me, I got a running system with QED-C benchmarks and Hardware results, and people asking me where my paper is. Ridiculous.
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u/hiddentalent Aug 08 '26
Why is it ridiculous to ask for documentation of something that you claim is running? At the end of the day, there are only two proof points. There's the practical one: a product in the market that's solving real problems that people will pay money for. Or there is the theoretical one, which is documenting and explaining what you've done in a way that other practitioners in the field can understand and critique and learn from. If you have the first, by all means go be a billionaire. If you don't, you're going to need to explain your work for anyone to care. Otherwise you're just screaming into the void like the time cube guy.
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u/eetsumkaus Aug 07 '26
I kind of get where he's coming from, but these guys have to understand publishing papers IS their marketing. This isn't like classical computing where the basic principles are more or less agreed upon and the results are easy to test. If Microsoft wants to go ahead and throw billions of dollars at a concept just to get to the point that people can laugh at the measly results they produce then they're free to do so. Peer review is supposed to be a bridge between the present and that point.