The Morning After: Google reveals its powerful Willow quantum chip

In its own heady blog post, Google debuted Willow, its latest quantum chip. It was flanked by hyped headlines that suggest something akin to the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The breakthrough might not be about the power, however: Google says it has reduced errors — a major issue with building quantum computers — by adding more qubits to the system.

In fact, Google makes no claim of quantum supremacy this time — something the company did when it publicly debuted its previous generation quantum computer in 2019. That claim quickly ended in controversy, with one researcher calling the company’s announcement “just plain wrong.”

Part of the issue then was that Google’s last quantum chip was not part of a general-purpose quantum computer. Instead, it surpassed classic computers in a single task: random circuit sampling (RCS). But, in Google’s own words, RCS has “no known real-world applications.”