Google’s announcement of its Willow quantum chip has sent the tech world into a buzz, but experts say quantum computing is still far from practical applications. Despite impressive benchmarks, the road to real-world use remains long.
What Is Willow, Google’s Latest Quantum Chip?
Google’s Quantum Chip Willow Shocks Tech World
FlyD/Unsplash
Google has unveiled a new quantum computing chip called Willow. According to the tech giant, this is a great achievement in the field of quantum computing. As it says Willow can reduce quantum errors exponentially.
According to CNN, is a critical problem that has eluded scientists for nearly three decades. If that’s the case, that would make quantum computers so much more reliable and open them up for use in almost every industry, from medicine to finance.
Willow was run against the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark, a computational task notoriously difficult for classical computers. Google says that Willow solved in less than five minutes a computation that would take the world’s fastest supercomputers more than 10 septillion years to solve—an unfathomably large number that, according to the firm’s estimates, exceeds known timescales in physics.
Read More:
Quantum Computer Study Reaches New Galaxies With Cooler-Than-Space Cooling System
The Promise of Quantum Computing
Quantum computing uses qubits, which have a more complex state than classical computing bits. Bits cannot be more than a one or a zero whereas qubits can be a one, zero, or a combination of both at the same time. It can therefore theoretically process significant amounts of data faster than any supercomputer today and probably solve problems that none of today’s computers can.
Quantum computing could give enormous breakthroughs in medicine, science, and finance.
“We need a ChatGPT moment for quantum,” Francesco Ricciuti, an associate at venture capital firm Runa Capital, told CNBC.
Ricciuti referenced the popular chatbot that was one of modern AI’s pioneering technology. However, Google’s quantum chip is “probably not that.”
The charm of quantum computers lies in solving complex problems such as drug discovery, climate modeling, and optimization of financial strategies — challenges that classical computers cannot deal with efficiently. And experts caution that these are still purely theoretical and no practical application has been discovered so far.
The Real-World Impact: Experts Weigh In
While there is all the fanfare around Willow, a significant number of quantum computing experts remain skeptical about its immediate real-world impact.
In fact, quantum computing itself has a long way to go before it can be reliably used for real-world applications. According to Winfried Hensinger, a professor of quantum technologies at the University of Sussex, this is a significant milestone, but still too small to tackle the complex problems that quantum computers are expected to solve.
At 105 qubits, Willow is still light-years away from the “millions of qubits” needed to address serious industry challenges.
Google’s Quantum Computing Attempts Still Take the Cake
Despite these limitations, Google’s breakthrough is undoubtedly a step forward for the quantum computing field. Hensinger and Ricciuti both agree that the advancements made by Google in quantum error correction increase the overall confidence that practical quantum computers will one day be possible. However, major hurdles remain, particularly in scaling up quantum computers to a size where they can solve real-world problems.
Yet one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing is extreme cooling. A superconducting qubits chip like Google’s Willow requires temperatures near absolute zero to run. Such conditions pose quite a challenge in scaling up the size of quantum computers to solve those big, complex problems.
According to Hensinger, it could be impossible to cool millions of qubits to such low temperatures.
Related Article:
Quantum Computing Could Start a Cybersecurity Armageddon, According to IBM