Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip

Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10^25) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.

↫ Hartmut Neven, Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI

The concensus seems to be that this is a major achievement and milestone in quantum computing, and that it’s come faster than everyone expected. This topic is obviously far more complicated than most people can handle, so we have to rely on the verdicts and opinions from independent experts to gain some sense of just how significant an announcement this really is. The paper’s published in Nature for those few of us possessing the right amount of skill and knowledge to disseminate this information.