Willow: Google's Sundar Pichai Launches Latest Quantum Computing Chip, Elon Musk Reacts

With ever increasing competition in the world of highly sophisticated technology, the pioneers and the dominant forces are always making efforts to up their game. Alphabet's Google, in an attempt to just do that, has launched the latest, 'state-of-the-art' quantum computing chip. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, took to X to introduce the new 'Willow'.

Google Introduces 'Willow'

Here, quantum computing is a system that takes advantage of quantum mechanical processes.

Physical matter has both particle and wave characteristics on microscopic scales, and quantum computing uses specialised gear to take advantage of this behaviour.

Coming back to Pichai and Google's announcement, in a post on X he said, Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially.

As mentioned in the statement, here the focus is mitigating errors. Pichai and Co's Willow intends to cut down on errors by increasing the cumulative amount of qubits in use.

Cracking a 30-Year Challenge

Here, a 'quibit' or quantum bit, is the fundamental unit of information in the realm of quantum computing. These qunatam bits are created using focused manipulation and measuring of quantum particles.

Accoriding to Pichai, "Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field."

Further, In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would take a leading supercomputer over 10^25 years, far beyond the age of the universe.

Elon Musk Reacts

Tesla and X boss Elon Musk, was quick to react to this new announcement. Unlike his recent rhetoric, Elon Musk's reaction was positive.

Musk commented below Sundar Pichai's post and said, "Wow".

Pichai replied to Musk's post and said, "We should do a quantum cluster in space with Starship one day:)"

Starship is Musk's SpaceX's marquee rocket system.

Musk continued the discourse and said, "That will probably happen. Any self-respecting civilization should at least reach Kardashev Type II. In my opinion, we are currently only at <5 per cent of Type I. To get to ~30 per cent, we would need to place solar panels in all desert or highly arid regions."

Pichai added, "indeed. We should scale solar so much more, amazing that we keep looking at alternatives when the most obvious path is staring at our eyes, literally!"