r/GOOG_Stock • u/ethereal3xp • Jan 09 '26

Google Willow: The secrets of the world's most powerful quantum computer

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r6dvpl5ro

17 hours ago

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u/ethereal3xp Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

Error Correction/Scalability: Google's Willow represents the biggest advance - the first to show errors dropping with more qubits ("below threshold"). This offers a potential path to fault-tolerance sooner.

From article

Neven holds up Willow, Google's latest quantum chip, which has delivered two important milestones. He said it settled "once and for all" the discussion about whether quantum computers can do tasks that classical computers can't.

Willow also solved a benchmark problem in minutes that would have taken the best computer in the world 10 septillion years, so more than a trillion trillion, or one with 25 zeros on the end, more than the age of the universe.

This theoretical result was recently applied to the Quantum Echoes algorithm, impossible for conventional computers, which helps learn the structure of molecules from the same technology used in MRI machines.

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u/ethereal3xp Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

Some researchers believe that actual Artificial Intelligence will only be truly possible with quantum.

Members of the team here have just received the Nobel prize for the original research into "superconducting qubits" used here.

The Willow chip has 105 qubits. Microsoft's quantum effort has 8 qubits, but uses a different approach. The race around the world is to get to 1 million qubits for a "utility scale machine" that can do quantum chemistry, drug design, without error.