The Quantum AI team has unveiled their latest groundbreaking quantum chip, Willow. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, along with the pioneers from the Google Quantum AI team, highlighted Willow’s ability to not only exponentially reduce quantum errors but also to outperform current supercomputers. In benchmark tests, the chip executed calculations that would take classical machines longer than the known age of the universe.
This new product is presented as a major milestone toward building large-scale quantum computers for practical, commercial applications. According to Google’s promotional materials, Willow could mark a turning point in the over 30-year quest for quantum error correction and algorithm effectiveness.
Since the early 1990s, scientists have confronted significant obstacles in creating practical quantum computers, mainly due to errors stemming from qubits’ sensitivity to environmental disturbances. Willow, developed at Google Quantum AI’s specialized facility in Santa Barbara, has reportedly surpassed a major hurdle by exponentially reducing error rates as the number of qubits increases. Researchers demonstrated this by scaling qubit lattices from 3×3 to 7×7, consistently halving the error rate at each step. This achievement marks a “below threshold” point in error correction where adding more qubits enhances the system’s performance.
You may find more at official Google Quantum AI presentation:
Hartmut Neven, founder and head of Google Quantum AI, emphasized that this advancement lays the foundation for functional quantum error correction anticipated since Peter Shor’s proposal in 1995, enabling the construction of larger and more stable quantum systems without information loss.
