Google’s Quantum AI founder and lead Hartmut Neven announced the company’s latest quantum chip, Willow. Willow offers high performance across several metrics, including two major achievements.
1.) Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. And this cracks a major challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for nearly 30 years.
2.) Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers ten septillion (that is, 10) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.
Neven said the Willow chip is a step towards a journey that started over 10 years ago. The vision back then was to build a large-scale quantum computer that could utilize quantum mechanics to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges.
Errors are one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing, since qubits (the units of computation in quantum computers) tend to exchange information rapidly with their environment, making it difficult to protect the information needed to complete a computation. Usually the more qubits you use, the more errors will occur.
Recently, Google published results showing that the more qubits that they used in Willow, the more the errors are reduced and the most quantum the system becomes. In fact, Google achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate, an accomplishment known as below threshold.
Another first with this result is an example of real-time error correction on a superconducting quantum system — essential for any useful computation.
Willow’s performance on this benchmark is impressive as it performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. This figure exceeds known timescales in physics and exceeds the age of the universe.
Willow was fabricated in the company’s new state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Santa Barbara, one of only a few facilities in the world built from the ground up for this purpose.
