Google made a big splash unveiling Willow, a quantum chip that, among other things, needs just five minutes to solve a problem that would take conventional supercomputers around 10 septillion years.
That’s a 1 followed by 25 zeros.
Think of quantum computing as turbo-charged computing. The classical computer in your laptop or phone uses binary bits to process information — either a 0 or a 1, either on or off. Everything a computer does, whether simple or complex, is the result of billions of zeros and ones working together.
A quantum bit, or qubit, sits in a state of possibility between a 0 and a 1. A qubit exists in a superposition, a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics where a quantum system exists in multiple states at the same time. When measured, it collapses to either 0 or 1.
When an interaction between two qubits is engineered — what quantum experts refer to as “entanglement” — the qubits consider interconnected possibilities simultaneously, processing information in ways standard computers simply can’t.
“We just built a fabulous new quantum chip, and we used it to do two interesting computations with it,” said Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI.
Right now, there’s not a long list of practical applications for quantum computing, but when you want to crunch a lot of data fast, quantum computing might be the tool companies use. Especially if corporations want to develop new drugs, car batteries or nuclear reactors.
Consumers who work for a living should care because one day, quantum computing is going to break out of the lab and into your daily life.
Neven made the big announcement about Willow at the Q2B conference in Santa Clara last week.
“I think there’s a sigh of relief in the community overall that certain things that were theoretically predicted, like how to do error correction, and that’s a technical term for an important technique you need … it was, in theory, always understood that this should work,” Neven said. “But we showed it for the first time in practice.”
Quantum researchers KQED spoke to at the conference applauded Google’s announcement, and not just because it pushes quantum computing forward. Venture capital investment in quantum computing research has dropped in the last two years due in part to the growing interest and investment in AI.
According to the European quantum computer manufacturer IQM, there’s been a 50% drop in venture capital invested into quantum startups in two years — from $2.2 billion in 2022 to around $1.2 billion in 2023. The hope is that Willow restores interest.
“The fact that Google is doing this work, along with others like IBM, is really wonderful for the industry,” said David Rivas, chief technology officer of Berkeley-based Rigetti Computing.
But that’s not to say the world needs to choose between the two technologies. Quantum experts see scientists using Generative AI and quantum in tandem — if not now, then sometime in the near future. Quantum computing could help AI tackle higher-dimensional, probabilistic and optimization-heavy challenges like, for instance, delivering a short list of possible treatments for diseases AI could focus on.
“These are two different technologies. Both will turn out to be the most transformational of our time,” Neven said. “But there are many things that AI or machine learning can do that quantum mechanics would be much better suited to do.”
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