I never bothered to read into it because a lot of tech "breakthrough" news is severely over hyped. Whenever I see such news, I usually just think to myself "if this invention/discovery is actually such a big thing, then I'll be hearing about it from everyone, not just some random clickbait youtuber and some buzzword-filled article".
Well, now I'm beginning to notice that a lot of people are in fact talking about this new Google chip. I've seen a number of articles being passed around and Youtube keeps recommending me videos on this topic. Since I'm an electrical engineering student, I now feel kinda obligated to read deeper into this new technology. I'm still a bit skeptical of it though, so I'm gonna make a few basic predictions first. After I actually read about this chip, I'll come back and assess just how wrong or right I was.
prediction 1: This is just another over hyped invention that sounds good but doesn't actually work exactly how buzzword titles describe it.
prediction 2: Yeah it's amazing and all but due to <physical limitation>, we won't be able to use it anywhere other than in research labs for another N years until <physical limitation> will be overcome in yet another breakthrough discovery/invention.
Edit: Ok, so I read some articles about this and the chip does seem to be a big achievement in quantum technology due to improved quantum error correction (I didn't know what that even was 20 minutes ago btw) and it being able to perform really fast on some specific benchmark. But nevertheless, quantum computing is still in it's infancy and we won't be seeing it used for anything real yet. As Google themselves mentioned in the last part of their announcement of this "Willow" chip:
The next challenge for the field is to demonstrate a first "useful, beyond-classical" computation on today's quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application. We’re optimistic that the Willow generation of chips can help us achieve this goal. So far, there have been two separate types of experiments. On the one hand, we’ve run the RCS benchmark, which measures performance against classical computers but has no known real-world applications. On the other hand, we’ve done scientifically interesting simulations of quantum systems, which have led to new scientific discoveries but are still within the reach of classical computers.
In conclusion, my second prediction was somewhat correct, which isn't super surprising given that quantum computing is still in the outset of development.
Edited 4 days ago
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Had a video on in the bg that mentioned the chip earlier, I think the big deal was the error correction scales or improves with as the number of qubits in quantum systems increases over time. I was baking cookies when I had whatever video that was on so I could be misremembering but I think that was it.
>I think the big deal was the error correction scales or improves with as the number of qubits in quantum systems increases over time
Yeah, pretty much that, and also the fact that it performed really fast on a benchmark that they used. These were the two things that Google listed as "major achievements" at the beginning of their announcement blog post.