Important points
Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG) soared after the company announced Willow, a quantum computing chip that can complete calculations in less than five minutes that would take some of today’s fastest supercomputers 1 billion years. Since then, it has soared to its highest level since July.
Willow’s ability to reduce errors exponentially by using more qubits, the units of information calculation in quantum computing, said Hartmut Neven, founder and leader of Google Quantum AI, in a blog post on Monday. pointed out. (Incidentally, a septillion is a 1 followed by 24 zeros, which is more than 15 parts per billion.)
Historically, quantum chips have generated more errors as more qubits are used, Naven said.
Willow achieves second of six Google Quantum milestones
The phenomenon, known as “quantum error correction,” is the second of six milestones in Google’s quantum computing roadmap, which will ultimately lead to a “large, error-corrected quantum computer.”
“Our commitment to building useful quantum computers with practical applications in areas such as drug discovery, fusion energy and battery design,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Monday at We see Willow as an important step in our journey.”
Alphabet stock rose more than 5% to close at $186.53 on Tuesday, and is up more than 30% so far this year.
