Technology AI, Science and New Things
In 2019 Google unveiled the Sycamore quantum computing chip, which researchers said could perform calculations in three minutes and 20 seconds that would take traditional supercomputers 10,000 years.
Then the supercomputers caught up, setting new records in 2022 and 2024.
On Monday Google announced it had leapfrogged the supercomputers again, unveiling a new quantum chip called Willow that needs five minutes to solve a task that would apparently take a leading supercomputer 10 septillion years (longer than the history of the known universe) and – a key development – was better at correcting errors.
The tech industry dreams of quantum computers driving advances in areas from drug development to cryptography. For now, quantum remains an experimental technology with no practical application.
But “people no longer doubt it will be done”, says Harvard physics professor Mikhail Lukin. “The question now is: when?
