Quantum computing has been promising a revolution for decades, usually accompanied by a footnote explaining why that revolution is still ten years away. Google’s announcement of its Willow chip in December 2024 felt different.
The chip, which contains 105 qubits, accomplished something that quantum computing researchers have been working toward for years: it solved a specific benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take the world’s fastest classical supercomputer an almost incomprehensible 10 septillion years — that’s 10 followed by 24 zeros.
“Error correction is the fundamental challenge of quantum computing,” said Hartmut Neven, who leads Google’s Quantum AI team. “What we’ve shown with Willow is that we can now systematically suppress errors as we scale up. This is the key that unlocks everything else.”
The caveat is that the benchmark Willow solved is specifically designed to be hard for classical computers but relatively well-suited for quantum systems. It doesn’t yet correspond to any practical problem that businesses or scientists actually want to solve.
Still, Willow represents genuine progress. The field has spent years arguing about whether quantum computing could ever work at scale. That debate is now largely settled.
Leave a Reply