Author: Stephen Katte, CoinTelegraph

The Google Quantum AI team has released its new quantum computing chip, capable of solving computational problems in less than five minutes, while one of the best supercomputers would take about a billion years to solve the same problem.

Hartmut Neven, head of Google Quantum AI, stated in a blog post on December 9 that this chip, named Willow, can exponentially correct errors and handle certain computations at an incredible speed.

"This incredible number exceeds the known time scales in physics and far surpasses the age of the universe," he said.

"This confirms the idea that quantum computing occurs in many parallel universes, which aligns with the notion that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first proposed by David Deutsch," Neven added.

According to Neven, another major achievement of the team using Willow is that as the scale of using more qubits increases, it can exponentially reduce errors, overcoming what experts in the field have called the 'critical challenge' of quantum error correction that has been pursued for nearly 30 years.

"By utilizing our latest advancements in quantum error correction, we were able to reduce the error rate by half. In other words, we achieved an exponential reduction in error rates."

The Google Quantum AI team stated that their new quantum computing chip Willow has performed excellently across multiple metrics.

"This historic achievement is referred to in the industry as 'below the threshold' — able to reduce the error rate while increasing the number of qubits," Neven added.

Qubits are the fundamental units of information and are key to quantum computing; the more qubits there are, the greater the computational power; however, increasing the number of qubits also increases the risk of errors.

If the error rate is too high, computations become unreliable and produce incorrect results, making the technology difficult to scale for practical use.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a statement to X on December 9 that Willow is an important step for the tech giant in creating a 'useful quantum computer'.

This computer will have practical applications in drug discovery, fusion energy, and battery design.

Google hopes to one day develop a computer capable of performing complex, error-corrected computations, and its quantum computing roadmap shows that the company reached 2 out of 6 milestones in 2023.

Is Willow a threat to encryption? Concerns have long been raised that advancements in quantum computing could become a turning point for the encryption industry. A computer capable of breaking encryption could expose users' funds to thieves quickly and in large amounts.

Technology entrepreneur and former senior product manager at Google Kevin Rose stated in a statement to X on December 9 that Willow is still far from posing a threat to cryptography.

According to Rose, to break Bitcoin's cryptographic algorithm, a quantum computer with about 13 million qubits would be required to decrypt within 24 hours.

"In comparison, Google's Willow chip has made significant progress but only has 105 qubits," he said.

"We still have a long way to go. Nevertheless, this is still a significant leap in the field of quantum computing."

Meanwhile, David Marcus, CEO of payment platform Lightspark, stated that he believes most people do not 'fully understand' the significance of Google's breakthrough.

Marcus stated that this means 'post-quantum cryptography and encryption technologies need to start taking action.'

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a method to mitigate the risks of quantum computing for Ethereum, explaining in an article on March X that a simple hard fork could overturn the issue.

Buterin stated that the blockchain must hard fork, and users must download new wallet software, but few would lose funds.#量子计算机 $BTC $BNB