Google claims quantum milestone — but can't solve real-world problems

A woman bikes by a giant Google logo at Google’s Bay View campus in Mountain View, California on Aug 13, 2024 where the “Made by Google” media event was held today. 

Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images

Google has unveiled a new chip that it says marks a major breakthrough in the field of quantum computing, an area seen as the next frontier for many tech companies.

However, while Google’s achievements have been noted for advancing the field, experts say that quantum computing still has no real-world uses — yet.

“We need a ChatGPT moment for quantum,” Francesco Ricciuti, associate at venture capital firm Runa Capital, told CNBC Tuesday, referencing OpenAI’s chatbot that has been credited with driving the boom in artificial intelligence. “This is probably not that.”

What has Google claimed?

Proponents of quantum computing claim it will be able to solve problems that current computers can’t.

In classical computing, information is stored in bits. Each bit is either a one or zero. Quantum computing uses quantum bits or qubits which can be zero, one or something in between.

The theory is that quantum computers will be able to process much larger volumes of data, leading to potential breakthroughs in areas like medicine, science and finance.

Google on Monday announced Willow, its latest quantum chip.

“Typically the more qubits you use, the more errors will occur, and the system becomes classical,” Hartmut Neven, founder of Google Quantum AI, wrote in a blog post.

Willow can reduce errors “exponentially” as the number of qubits is scaled up, the U.S. tech giant said, which “cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.”

Google measured Willow’s performance using the so-called random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark, which presents a computational task that’s difficult for classical computers to solve.

Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years — or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years — Google said.

“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” Neven said.

Has Google truly made a quantum breakthrough?

Google’s Willow chip has demonstrated a “new milestone in how quantum computers can deal with errors that happen during their operation,” according to Winfried Hensinger, professor of quantum technologies at the University of Sussex.

“Their technique becomes more effective in reducing errors the more extra qubits are being used to correct for these errors. This is a very important milestone for quantum computers.”

But despite optimism that quantum computing could one day change the world — or at least computers’ role in it — experts in the field have suggested that Google’s quantum computing breakthrough is still lacking in real-world uses.

Runa Capital’s Ricciuti said that Google’s claims of success are “based on tasks and benchmarks that are not really useful for practical cases.”

“They are trying to define a really high problem for normal computers that they can solve with quantum computers. It is amazing they can do that, but it doesn’t really mean it is useful,” Ricciuti added.

Hensinger said Willow “is still well too small to do useful calculations” and that quantum computers will require “millions of qubits” to solve really important industry problems. Willow has 105 qubits.

Meanwhile, Google’s chip is based on superconducting qubits, a technology that requires intense cooling, which could be a limiting factor in scaling up.

“It may be fundamentally hard to build quantum computers with such large number of qubits using superconducting qubits as cooling so many qubits to the required temperature – close to absolute zero – would be hard or impossible,” Hensinger said.

Still both Hensinger and Ricciuti agree the developments by Google add to the excitement around quantum computing and continued development in the space.

“This result increases confidence further that humanity will be able to build practical quantum computers enabling some of the high impactful applications quantum computers are known for,” Hensinger said.

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