In its blog post titled, Google released Willow, its latest quantum chip. It is lined with translated headlines that suggest something like an obelisk in the middle 2001: A Space Odyssey. The breakthrough may not be about power, however: Google says it has reduced errors — a major problem with building quantum computers — by adding more qubits to the system.
In fact, Google isn’t making any quantum quantum claims this time around – something the company did when it publicly unveiled its previous-generation quantum computer in 2019. That claim was quickly met with controversy, with one analyst calling the company’s announcement “just plain wrong.”
Part of the problem at the time was that Google’s last quantum chip wasn’t part of a general-purpose computer. Instead, it surpassed classical computers in one task: random region sampling (RCS). But, in Google’s own words, RCS has “no known real-world applications.”
However, the company has stuck to the metric, saying that RCS performance is a widely recognized quantum computing benchmark. That makes real comparisons difficult: Competitors including IBM and Honeywell use the quantum volume metric to tout their success. They say it provides a more comprehensive understanding of the machine’s capabilities. Google’s spec sheets and blog posts do not mention quantum volume at all.
— Matt Smith
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