Google announced the unveiling of a new chip which the search engine giant claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest super computers ten septillion years to complete. With the quantum chip, it outperformed classical computers and broke the error correction threshold.
“Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on X on Monday.
The chip is the latest development in quantum computing – which is attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of astoundingly powerful computer.
According to Google, its new quantum chip incorporates key “breakthroughs” and “paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.” However, according to experts, Willow is, for now, a largely experimental device, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years and billions of dollars away.
“In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would take a leading supercomputer over 10^25 years, far beyond the age of the universe(!).” Pichai added, “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.”
Hartmut Neven, founder and lead, Google Quantum AI, in Google blogspot, wrote, “Today, I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.” According to him, Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. He said the new introduction cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.
“The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges. As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications,” he further wrote.
Musk reaction
“Wow,” Musk wrote, inviting an exchange between the SpaceX founder and the Google chief, who wrote back, “We should do a quantum cluster in space with Starship one day,” with a smiley face. “That will probably happen,” Musk replied. “Any self-respecting civilization should at least reach Kardashev Type II. In my opinion, we are currently only at <5% of Type I. To get to ~30%, we would need to place solar panels in all desert or highly arid regions.”
Like other tech giants such as Microsoft and IBM, Google is chasing quantum computing because it promises computing speeds far faster than today’s fastest systems. Willow has 105 “qubits,” which are the building blocks of quantum computers. Qubits are fast but error-prone because they can be jostled by something as small as a subatomic particle from events in outer space.
As more qubits are packed onto a chip, those errors can add up to make the chip no better than a conventional computer chip. So, since the 1990s, scientists have been working on quantum error-correction.