Google’s Willow quantum chip breakthrough is hidden behind a questionable benchmark

Google debuted Willow, its latest quantum chip, on Wednesday, and if you’ve spent any time online since, you’ve undoubtedly run into some breathless reporting about it. Willow “crushes classical computers on a cosmic timescale,” proclaims one headline; Google “unveils ‘mind-boggling’ quantum computer chip,” reads another. It’s all anchored by a claim that Willow can complete a computation that would theoretically take a classical computer significantly more time than the 14 billion years the universe has existed. But, as you can probably guess, what the chip represents is not so simple.

First, with Willow, Google makes no claim of quantum supremacy, something the company did when it publicly debuted its previous generation quantum computer, Sycamore, back in 2019. You may recall that, at the time, Google publicized how it took Sycamore just 200 seconds to perform a calculation that would have theoretically taken the world’s then-fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. That feat, the company said, demonstrated that it had created a quantum computer that could solve problems the best classical computers could not even attempt. In other words, Google had achieved quantum supremacy.