How quantum could supercharge Google’s AI ambitions

Inside a secretive set of buildings in Santa Barbara, California, scientists at Alphabet are working on one of the company's most ambitious bets yet. They're attempting to develop the world's most advanced quantum computers. "In the future, quantum and AI, they could really complement each other back and forth," said Julian Kelly, director of hardware at Google Quantum AI. Google has been viewed by many as late to the generative AI boom, because OpenAI broke into the mainstream first with ChatGPT in late 2022. Late last year, Google made clear that it wouldn't be caught on the backfoot again. The company unveiled a breakthrough quantum computing chip called Willow, which it says can solve a benchmark problem unimaginably faster than what's possible with a classical computer, and demonstrated that adding more quantum bits to the chip reduced errors exponentially. "That's a milestone for the field," said John Preskill, director of the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Mat ... Read full article.