I'm sure many of you have heard about Google's claim to have broken records with their quantum computer project. Its very impressive. I was listening to a local radio talk show talk about it and my BS meter was breaking.
This morning I saw @petertodd shared a post from
Sabine Hossenfelder where she explains a bit of the context missing from Google's press release. It confirmed some suspicions I've had.
Here is what she wrote.
I see a lot of confusion about Google's Monday press release about quantum supremacy, so let me try to clarify a few things.
They say they did a computation on a ca 100 qubit chip much faster than a conventional (super)computer could do. The particular calculation in question is to produce a random distribution. The result of this calculation has no practical use.
They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entanglement). That also allows them to say things like "this would have taken a septillion years on a conventional computer" etc.
It's exactly the same calculation that they did in 2019 on a ca 50 qubit chip. In case you didn't follow that, Google's 2019 quantum supremacy claim was questioned by IBM pretty much as soon as the claim was made and a few years later a group said they did it on a conventional computer in a similar time.
So while the announcement is super impressive from a scientific pov and all, the consequences for everyday life are zero. Estimates say that we will need about 1 million qubits for practically useful applications and we're still about 1 million qubits away from that.
Also, it's been a recurring story that we have seen numerous times in the past years, that claims of quantum "utility" or quantum "advantage" or quantum "supremacy" or whatever you want to call it later evaporate because some other group finds a clever way to do it on a conventional computer after all.
Take it from someone that has been around the tech world for a while. You need to ALWAYS keep your skeptical hat on. Not to take away from the work these people are doing there are always incentives to frame things in a way that makes them appear more favorable. This happens with every business but for some reason people are extra gullible with tech business news.