Google’s new quantum chip is called Google Quantum Chip Willow CEOs Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai say we should use Google’s new quantum chip, which Google CEO Sundar Pichai developed. Google Willow Explains a Quantum Leap in Computing Power The company claims that the Willow chip can solve any problem in just five minutes Google Quantum Chip Willow.
Meet Willow, Our Cutting-Edge Quantum Chip Today I’m excited to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has cutting-edge performance across several metrics, enabling two major achievements. It would take 10 septillion years to become the world’s fastest supercomputer. Quantum algorithms have computational scaling laws, as we’re seeing with RCS. Similar scaling has the potential to benefit many cultural computational campaigns for AI. Solve problems in minutes that would take supercomputers billions of years. The success impressed Elon Musk, starting a conversation about the urgent need for future quantum clusters in space and scaled solar power.
So quantum computing will be essential for collecting training data that is inaccessible to classical machines, for training and optimizing some learning architectures, and for modeling systems where quantum effects are important. The first is that Willow can rapidly reduce errors as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for nearly 30 years Google Quantum Chip Willow. Second, Willow calculated a standard benchmark in five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillions (i.e. 1025) years. This number exceeds the age of the universe. Google unveils its new quantum chip – Willow. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the launch of the chip on Twitter (formerly known as Twitter). “Introducing Willow, the Willow chip is a major step in a journey that began 10 years ago. When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics—nature’s “operating system” as we know it today—to advance scientific discovery, create useful applications, and benefit society.
With our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip, we’re taking on the challenge of the year by scaling up to more qubits. We’ve tested large-scale physical qubits, scaling from a grid of 3×3 encoded qubits to a 7×7 grid. —And each time, using our recent advances in quantum error correction, we were able to cut the error rate in half, solving a standard calculation in <5 minutes that would take more than 10^25 universe years,” Pichai said in a message posted on X. To show real progress in error correction, you need to demonstrate staying below the threshold, and this has been an outstanding challenge since quantum error correction was introduced by Peter Shor in 1995.
We are focusing on quality, not just quantity – because simply creating a large number of qubits doesn’t help if they are not of high enough quality. With 105 qubits, Willow now has best-in-class performance across the two system benchmarks discussed above for quantum error correction and random circuit sampling 10 septillions. As a measure of Willow’s performance, we used a random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark Google Quantum Chip Willow. Willow Wauws Elon Musk Willow announced the launch of 2X, describing it as achieving “exponential error reduction and unprecedented computational speed.” We’ve consistently used this benchmark to assess the progress of chips from one generation to the next — we reported on Sycamore’s results in October 2019 and again recently in October 2024. He said Willow could solve the problem Google Quantum Chip Willow. Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025, or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number is beyond the known timescales of physics and surpasses the age of the universe. Traditional supercomputers take billions of years.
The breakthrough achievement brought a surprised but enthusiastic response from Elon Musk, who simply tweeted “Wow.” Systems engineering is crucial when designing and building quantum chips: All the components of a chip, such as single- and two-qubit gates, qubit resets, and readouts, must be well-engineered and integrated at the same time. The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate the first “useful, non-classical” calculations on today’s quantum chips that are relevant to real-world applications.
We are optimistic that the Willow generation of chips can help us achieve this goal. My colleagues sometimes ask me why I left the growing field of AI to focus on quantum computing Google Quantum Chip Willow.