Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip \ stacker news ~tech

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Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/

358 sats \ 4 comments \ @Rsync25 9 Dec tech

I'm not really qualified to speak on quantum computing. So happy to be shown differently...

But the entire field feels sorta scammy. For instance, they never demonstrate practical problems being solved, but instead they invent specific calculation "benchmarks" and then demonstrate how fast their quantum chip is at solving that.

In this case they are bragging about this chip solved "RCS" 10^25 times faster then classical computing. But when you read more about "RCS" you find that it was a calculation developed by the quantum research team, specifically for testing their chip.

It all comes across like they are just farming for PR to get quick stock price bumps.

11 sats \ 2 replies \ @freetx 10 Dec

Update. Sabine Hossenfelder (who is 1000x more knowledgeable than me) seems very skeptical.

They say they did a computation on a ca 100 qubit chip much faster than a conventional (super)computer could do. The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use.

They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entanglement). That also allows them to say things like "this would have taken a septillion years on a conventional computer" etc.

It's exactly the same calculation that they did in 2019 on a ca 50 qubit chip. In case you didn't follow that, Google's 2019 quantum supremacy claim was questioned by IBM pretty much as soon as the claim was made and a few years later a group said they did it on a conventional computer in a similar time.

So while the announcement is super impressive from a scientific pov and all, the consequences for everyday life are zero. Estimates say that we will need about 1 million qubits for practically useful applications and we're still about 1 million qubits away from that.

https://xcancel.com/skdh/status/1866352680899104960

11 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 11 Dec

She is a quasi YouTube celebrity physicist!

11 sats \ 0 replies \ @freetx 11 Dec

Yea, I only just discovered her a few months ago.