Majorana 2 contains qubits that are 1,000x more reliable than those in our previous quantum processing unit. The new material stack, which swaps aluminum for lead, creates highly reliable topological qubits with operations on the microsecond scale and lifetimes with a mean of 20 seconds, occasionally exceeding one minute. This rapid progress, enabled by AI, has cut our timeline in half for delivering a scalable quantum computer—now anticipated by 2029.

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By applying recent advances in agentic AI specially designed to speed the scientific process and accelerate collaboration, Microsoft’s quantum team is overcoming key barriers in reliability, speed and size that have limited the application of quantum computing to real-life scenarios.

Now, others searching for scientific or engineering breakthroughs can leverage the same agentic AI expertise that Microsoft’s own quantum team is using in its Majorana program.

The company also announced today the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, its comprehensive platform for organizations to embrace Frontier R&D. This combines specialized AI agents for scientific research and development, a Discovery Engine that drives research and reasoning workflows, plus enterprise-level security, governance and transparency.

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Agentic AI can speed experimentsAgentic AI can speed experiments

Creating a topological state requires setting hundreds of parameters. Then measurement, which is the key to performing quantum computations, can start. When done by a person, these processes each take weeks. In fact, measurement is so difficult and time consuming that the team had tried to automate it a few years ago using earlier forms of machine learning, but it wasn’t possible, Alam said.

Using agentic capabilities available in Microsoft Discovery, the team was able to create an AI agent specialized for this job, which cut the cycle time by orders of magnitude, he said.

AI’s pattern-recognition abilities helped with the difficult task of measuring what state the qubit is in and detecting whether there’s an even or odd number of billions of electrons on a semiconductor wire. AI agents run the process automatically and continuously, building a 3D map of the conditions that a single scientist would never be able to do in the same way, Alam said.

“Using agentic AI to automate the measurements was a game changer,” he said. “It goes through some math and starts saying, ‘Hey, where do I find the lowest point where everything sort of works?’ And it can do all these voltage adjustments in parallel, which a human cannot do. The way our minds work, we are more linear.”

Not sure how much of it hype because they want to sell their agentic AI product, but damn, might need to revisit how we do science in our lab if that's the future of scientific discovery...