The world is currently breathlessly watching the progress of AI, but an even more disruptive technology could be on the horizon — quantum computing.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that quantum computing now is where AI was in the 2010s, indicating it was poised for take off. He added that practically useful quantum computers would be created in 5-10 years.
“The progress in quantum is palpably exciting,” Pichai said at an event. “We’ve been focused on it for a long time. I think we have the most advanced state-of-the-art effort anywhere in the world,” he added.
“The latest breakthrough we had, we were able to perform a computation in five minutes that would have taken one of the world’s fastest supercomputers over 10 billion years. It’s longer than our universe has been around. But more importantly, it shows that we can tackle the error correction in a way that we can build large scale, fault tolerant quantum computers,” he explained.
“You know, I would say to me, the quantum moment reminds me of where AI was in the 2010s, you know, when we were working on Google Brain and you know, and the early progress. So I would say, you know, that’s what it feels to me. In the, in a five to ten year time frame, I think you will start practically useful quantum computers,” he added.
Google is at the cutting-edge of research into quantum computing. In 2019, Google achieved “quantum supremacy” by demonstrating that its Sycamore quantum computer could perform calculations beyond the capabilities of classical computers, completing a task in 200 seconds that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. Since then, Google has continued to advance quantum computing by developing quantum algorithms and applications for chemistry, materials science, and machine learning, and by striving to develop even more powerful quantum processors. Google’s Quantum AI team achieved a milestone in 2023 by demonstrating that increasing the number of qubits can reduce errors, which means that the company is now able to operate quantum computers in a much more efficient way. Google has also made its research tools available to the public, including the Quantum Virtual Machine. In September 2024, Google researchers announced a breakthrough in quantum error correction, demonstrating that they could add components to reduce errors, paving the way for quantum computers that finally live up to the technology’s promise. Google’s new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California, includes its first quantum data center, quantum hardware research laboratories, and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. And with the company now saying that practically useful quantum computers are only 5-10 years away, this might set off another round of rapid advancement in addition to the progress that’s currently being made through AI.