A woman rides a bicycle next to the giant Google logo at Google's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California on August 13, 2024, where the “Made by Google” media event was held today.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
Google Amazon has unveiled a new chip that it says represents a major breakthrough in quantum computing, an area seen as the next frontier for many technology companies.
However, while Google's achievements in advancing the field have been noted, experts say quantum computing still has no real-world uses — yet.
“We need a ChatGPT moment for quantum,” Francesco Ricciotti, an associate at venture capital firm Rona Capital, told CNBC on Tuesday, referring to OpenAI's chatbot that is credited with leading the boom in artificial intelligence. “Maybe this isn't it.”
What did Google claim?
Proponents of quantum computing claim that it will be able to solve problems that current computers cannot.
In classical computing, information is stored in bits. Each bit is either one or zero. Quantum computing uses quantum bits, or qubits, that can be zero, one, or something in between.
The theory is that quantum computers will be able to process much larger amounts of data, leading to potential breakthroughs in fields such as medicine, science and finance.
Google on Monday Willow announced its latest quantum chip.
“Usually, the more qubits you use, the more errors there are, and the more classical the system becomes,” Hartmut Niven, founder of Google Quantum AI, wrote in a blog post.
The US tech giant said Willow can “drastically” reduce errors as the number of qubits increases, which “breaks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for nearly 30 years.”
Google measured Willow's performance using what's called Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) benchmark, which is a computational task that's difficult for traditional computers to solve.
Google said Willow performed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years — or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
“This astonishing number exceeds the known timescales in physics and greatly exceeds the age of the universe,” Nevin said.
Has Google really achieved a quantum breakthrough?
Google's Willow slide showed “a new milestone in how quantum computers deal with errors that occur while they work,” said Winfried Hensinger, professor of quantum technologies at the University of Sussex.
“Their technique becomes more effective at reducing errors the more additional qubits are used to correct these errors. This is a very important milestone for quantum computers.”
But despite optimism that quantum computing could one day change the world — or at least the role of computers in it — experts in the field have pointed out that Google's quantum computing breakthrough still lacks real-world uses.
Runa Capital's Ricciuti said Google's claims of success “are based on tasks and criteria that are not really useful for practical cases.”
“They're trying to define a really big problem for regular computers that they can solve using quantum computers,” Ricciotti added. “It's amazing that they can do that, but that doesn't really mean it's useful.”
Hensinger said that Willow is “still too small to do useful calculations” and that quantum computers will require “millions of qubits” to solve really important industry problems. Willow has 105 qubits.
Meanwhile, Google's chip relies on superconducting qubits, a technology that requires extensive cooling, which could be a limiting factor in expansion.
“Building quantum computers with this many qubits would be fundamentally difficult using superconducting qubits, because cooling that many qubits to the required temperature — near absolute zero — would be difficult or impossible,” Hensinger said.
Still, both Hensinger and Ricciuti agree that Google's developments add to the excitement around quantum computing and continued development in the space.
“This result increases confidence that humanity will be able to build practical quantum computers that enable some of the high-impact applications that quantum computers are known for,” Hensinger said.
