Google Announces Quantum Supremacy Again

Google announces what appears to be quantum supremacy:

Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, 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.

We have been down this road before. These results are published in the Nature journal, showing that they are accepted as correct.

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. ...

Of course, as happened after we announced the first beyond-classical computation in 2019, we expect classical computers to keep improving on this benchmark, but the rapidly growing gap shows that quantum processors are peeling away at a double exponential rate and will continue to vastly outperform classical computers as we scale up.

I reported on these claims of double exponential growth back in 2019.

Have I been proved wrong? Possibly. They are still not computing anything useful, but just using the quantum computer to generate random numbers in a way that is hard to simulate in other ways. I will be interested to see what other skeptics say.

I do not think that this is any evidence for the multiverse. I will also be interested to see if the other many-worlds advocates claim this work.

Update: Gil Kalai reiterates his criticism of Google's big 2019 claim of quantum supremacy, and concludes:

I usually don’t mind “hype” as a reflection of scientists’ enthusiasm for their work and the public’s excitement about scientific endeavors. However, in the case of Google, some caution is warranted, as the premature claims in 2019 may have had significant consequences. For example, following the 2019 “supremacy” announcement, the value of Bitcoin dropped (around October 24, 2019, after a period of stability) from roughly $9,500 to roughly $8,500 in just a few days, representing a loss for investors of more than ten billion dollars. (The value today is around $100,000.) Additionally, Google’s assertions may have imposed unrealistic challenges on other quantum computing efforts and encouraged a culture of undesirable scientific methodologies.

The paper is paywalled and still being editing. All you can download is the abstract and list of about 100 Google authors.

Update: Google promotional video.