Google has unveiled its most powerful quantum computer chip

• Google has introduced its new chip Willow, which outperforms current computer benchmarks.
• Google says the chip overcomes a 30-year hurdle and advances quantum computing for commercial purposes.
• Technology leaders including Sam Altman and Elon Musk have praised the development.

Google has unveiled a new chip that claims to reduce errors and far outperform standard benchmarks in quantum computing.

The company said the new chip, called Willow, can perform a standard benchmark calculation in under five minutes. For the same task, the fastest supercomputers today would take 10 septillion years, longer than the universe has existed.

In a Dec. 9 X post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the chip had solved “a 30-year challenge in this space.”

“We see Willow as an important step on our path to building a useful quantum computer with practical applications in areas such as drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design and more,” he said in a follow-up post.

The new chip has been praised by other leading tech figures, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, reposted the announcement and congratulated the company on the development, while Musk responded to Pachai’s post with “Wow.”

Google’s development represents a major milestone in the decades-long race to build quantum computers accurate enough to enable practical applications.

Quantum computers use quantum mechanics to solve problems faster than traditional computers. Qubits – the unit of information in quantum computing – are unpredictable and have high margins of error.

It used to be true that the more qubits a chip had, the more errors occurred. This has been a prominent challenge in the field since the 1990s.

To show progress, quantum computers must demonstrate that they are “subthreshold,” meaning they can reduce errors while increasing the number of qubits.

On Monday, Google published an experiment in the science magazine Nature that shows the new potential of the Willow chip. The study showed that the more qubits in the Willow chip are scaled up, the lower the error rate. Google also said that errors in its new chip can be corrected as they occur.

The director of Google’s Quantum AI lab, Michael Cuthbert, told the BBC that commercial applications for a quantum computing chip would not be available until 2030 at the earliest.

Experts hailed 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 commercially. However, Google’s recent developments have shown that with increasing scale, a significant reduction in error rates can be achieved.

In a blog post, Google also praised Willow’s performance on the Random Circuit Sampling Benchmark, a method for testing the performance of quantum computers, as “amazing.”

“It performed a calculation in less than five minutes that would make one of the fastest 1025 or 10 September authoritative supercomputers today. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. That mind-boggling number “exceeds known timescales in physics and significantly exceeds the ages of the universe,” the company said in the mail.