Google announces quantum computing chip ‘Willow’ that can beat all existing supercomputers, suggests existence of parallel worlds

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced their new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip ‘Willow’, stating that the chip has solved a problem that has been perplexing the world of quantum computers for over 30 years. Google has stated that Willow can easily compute a calculation in less than 5 minutes, which will take currently existing supercomputers over 10^25 years to solve, ‘longer than the age of the universe’.

Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field. In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would…

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) December 9, 2024

“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”, a blog by Hartmut Neven, the lead of Google’s Quantum AI team stated.

In the same blog post, Nevel has also suggested that the capabilities that Willow has displayed leads credence to the idea that may be we are living in a multiverse, because the level of quantum computation might be possible only in multiple parallel universes.

“Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10²⁵ or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch“, Neven wrote.

The blog post by Neven, that Sundar Pichai shared, can be read here.

Pichai has posted that Willow will be an important step in Google’s journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design and much more.