Yesterday, Hartmut Neven, Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI, stated that he was delighted to announce Willow, Google's 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.

The second, is that 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. 

The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When Neven founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society's greatest challenges. As part of Google Research, their team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications.