Google unveiled a new chip that it says reduces errors and vastly outperforms standard benchmarks in quantum computing.
The company said the new chip, called Willow, can perform a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes. The same task would take the current fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years, longer than the universe had existed.
In an X post on December 9, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the chip cracked "a 30-year challenge in the field."
"We see Willow as an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design + more," he said in a follow-up post.
The new chip won praise from other leading tech figures, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, reposted the announcement congratulating the company on the development, while Musk replied to Pachai's post saying, "Wow."
Google's development represents a key milestone in the decadeslong race to build quantum computers that are accurate enough to have practical applications.
Quantum computers use quantum mechanics to solve problems faster than traditional computing. Qubits — the unit of information in quantum computing — are unpredictable and have high error margins.
In the past, the more qubits a chip has the more errors appear. This has been an outstanding challenge in the field since the 1990s.
To show progress, quantum computers must demonstrate they are "below threshold," which means they can drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits.
Google published an experiment in the science journal Nature on Monday showing the new potential of the Willow chip. The study demonstrated that the more qubits are scaled up in the Willow chip, the lower the rate of error. Google also said errors in their new chip can be corrected as they occur.
The director of Google's Quantum AI lab, Hartmut Neven, told the BBC that commercial applications for a quantum computing chip would still not be available before 2030, at the earliest.
Experts have praised the company's efforts as a major breakthrough in the field.
"This work shows a truly remarkable technological breakthrough," Chao-Yang Lu, a quantum physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, told Nature.
Current quantum computers on the market are too small and make too many errors to be used for commercial gain. However, Google's recent development has demonstrated a significant reduction in the error rate can be achieved with increased scale.
In a blog post, Google also praised Willow's performance on the random circuit sampling benchmark, a method of testing the performance of quantum computers, as "astonishing."
"It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe," the company said in the post.
Correction: December 11, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the director of Google's Quantum AI lab. Hartmut Neven is the director of Google's Quantum AI lab who spoke with the BBC.
