The Next Morning: Google Unveils Its Powerful Quantum Chip Willow.

Google recently unveiled Willow, its new quantum chip, in a blog post that has generated considerable excitement. The company has accompanied the launch with suggestive headlines evoking the famous obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, the most significant advancement lies not so much in the chip's power but in the reduction of errors, a major challenge in building quantum computers as more qubits are incorporated into the system.

Unlike its previous launch in 2019, when it proclaimed to have achieved quantum supremacy, this new announcement does not include such a claim. At that time, the statement sparked controversy when a researcher described the announcement as "simply incorrect." The issue was that Google’s previous quantum chip was not part of a general-purpose quantum computer; it only surpassed classical computers in a specific task: random circuit sampling (RCS). However, Google has acknowledged that RCS has no known practical applications in the real world.

Despite this, Google continues to use RCS performance as a recognized standard in the field of quantum computing, complicating comparisons with its rivals. Other companies, such as IBM and Honeywell, use quantum volume metrics to highlight their advancements, arguing that these provide a more comprehensive understanding of a machine's capabilities. In its informational material and publication, Google does not reference this quantum volume.