The tech behemoth asserts that it can fix mistakes instantly and has achieved a “exponential reduction in the error rate.”

Google said that with its new device, Willow, it had solved a significant problem with quantum computing.

Since more qubits—the fundamental unit of information in quantum computing—are required to scale up quantum computers, error correction is a crucial challenge in the field. The capabilities of quantum computing are often unattainable since qubits become increasingly prone to errors the more of them are added. The tech behemoth asserts in a study that was published in Nature yesterday, December 9, that the more qubits added to its new device, the lower the errors.

Hartmut Neven, the creator and head of Google Quantum AI, stated in a blog post that goes with it that the team examined “ever-larger arrays of physical qubits” and was able to reduce the mistake rate by half each time. To put it another way, we were able to reduce the mistake rate exponentially. The ability to reduce errors while increasing the amount of qubits is referred to in the field as “below threshold,” he said.

“To show true progress on error correction, you have to show that you are below the threshold, and this has been a persistent challenge since Peter Shor introduced quantum error correction in 1995.”

Neven said that Willow is “the most convincing prototype” for a scalable logical qubit to date and that it provides “compelling examples” of real-time error correction on a superconducting quantum system. “It’s a clear indication that it is possible to construct practical, extremely large quantum computers.”

Google is one of several big tech companies that have been making significant investments in an effort to address the issues preventing quantum computing from becoming a more advanced technology. The search engine giant asserted in 2019 that it had attained “quantum supremacy,” claiming that its experimental quantum processor had finished a calculation in three minutes and twenty seconds that would have taken a conventional supercomputer less than 10,000 years to complete.

Google’s assertion was swiftly contested by IBM, another significant player in the quantum space, who said that Google had undervalued the traditional supercomputer. In 2022, IBM unveiled a novel technique to double the scale of quantum simulations, continuing its efforts to address significant quantum problems. A $100 million project with US and Japanese institutions to create a quantum-centric supercomputer over the following ten years was also started by the tech corporation in 2023.