Even as the world has been focused in AI, Google has been quietly making lots of progress in a different field.
Google has released a new quantum chip that has managed to solve a problem that would take the current fastest supercomputers 10^25 years to solve in just 5 minutes. “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 CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X. “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(!),” he added.
Quantum computing leverages the principles of quantum mechanics to perform calculations far beyond the capabilities of classical computers. Unlike classical computers, which use bits to represent information as either 0 or 1, quantum computers utilize quantum bits, or qubits, which can exist in multiple states simultaneously, thanks to a phenomenon called superposition. Qubits can exist as both 0 and 1 at the same time until they’re measured, which allows quantum computers to explore multiple possibilities simultaneously, and thus solve problems dramatically faster than conventional computing systems.
But one of the chief problems of quantum computing is that qubits are prone to errors. “Qubits have a tendency to rapidly exchange information with their environment, making it difficult to protect the information needed to complete a computation. Typically the more qubits you use, the more errors will occur, and the system becomes classical (like a conventional computer),” Google wrote on its blog. Google’s new chip, however, managed to reduce errors with the more qubits it used, which is a major technical breakthrough — it could lead to the creation of bigger and more stable quantum computers.
Someone who seemed impressed with the new chip was Elon Musk. He posted “wow” below Sundar Pichai’s post on X announcing Willow. “We should do a quantum cluster in space with Starship one day:)” Pichai then replied. “That will probably happen,” Musk said. “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,” he added.
These are still early days, but quantum computing has the potential to upend many fields. It can help with drug discovery, allowing researchers to simulate complex molecular interactions to accelerate drug development. It can disrupt cryptography by breaking current encryption methods and developing quantum-resistant encryption, and it can help in artificial intelligence as well by enhancing machine learning algorithms for faster and more accurate results. Google had played a big part in ushering in the current AI revolution with its Transformers paper — it now seems to be making a similar move in the field of quantum computing.