Neven shares that his initial goal when founding Google Quantum AI in 2012 was “to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics”.

For those unfamiliar with the science, quantum mechanics “is the field of physics that explains how extremely small objects simultaneously have the characteristics of both particles (tiny pieces of matter) and waves (a disturbance or variation that transfers energy),” as described by the Department of Energy.

A quantum computer is essentially a machine capable of solving problems much faster than any devices we currently use by leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics.

The initial aim of Google Quantum AI in developing a large-scale quantum computer was to benefit “society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges”.

The company has now shared an exciting advancement in their progress.

Introducing Willow, Google Quantum AI’s latest quantum chip, which has demonstrated ‘state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics’, with two particularly notable achievements.

Neven explains: “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, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.”

Let’s simplify that for better understanding.

To unpack the first achievement, in quantum computing, units of computation known as qubits “have a tendency to rapidly exchange information with their environment, making it difficult to protect the information needed to complete a computation”.

“Typically the more qubits you use, the more errors will occur,” Neven explains.

However, with Willow’s testing, the team observed that the use of more qubits resulted in fewer errors.

As a result, the Willow chip is the ‘first system’ capable of ‘driving errors down while scaling up the number of qubits’, making it ‘the most convincing prototype for a scalable logical qubit built to date’.

In addition to this impressive feat, the chip is also exceptionally quick.

The team employed the ‘hardest benchmark that can be done’ to test the chip, which essentially ‘checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer’.

Neven stated: “Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”

It’s truly an impressive achievement.