Another revolutionary technological advancement will provide magical assistance for AI.
On December 10th Beijing time, Google announced the development of its new quantum chip Willow. This powerful chip has achieved a crucial breakthrough in the field of quantum computing over the past 30 years, completing tasks that today's computers take 10 years to complete in just 5 minutes. The research results were published in the journal Nature on December 9th.
After the news came out, the quantum information industry cheered and the AI circle was also greatly shocked.
Two key breakthroughs
Willow's major breakthroughs are reflected in two aspects: one is the significant increase in performance, that is, computing power.
5 minutes of computation is equivalent to a task that the fastest computer currently can complete in 10 years. 10& sup2; Years are much older than the age of the universe (about 13 billion years). 5 minutes and 10& sup2; In the year, this comparison shows that the leap in computing speed is very terrifying.
The second is the powerful quantum error correction capability.
The ordinary computers we use in our daily lives are based on classical physics, adopt binary systems, and use bits as the basic unit for information storage and processing. Each bit can only represent two states, 0 or 1. And quantum computers follow the laws of quantum mechanics, using quantum bits as the basic unit for storing and processing information. Quantum bits exist in a superposition state of 0 and 1, which can greatly improve computational efficiency. But the problem is that the more quantum bits a chip contains, the higher the probability of errors.
In 1995, Peter Shor, a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at MIT, introduced the concept of quantum error correction. For 30 years, scientists have been studying quantum error correction, but have not achieved fundamental breakthroughs.
Willow's significant progress in the field of quantum error correction is that, based on a scalable square grid, the number of logical qubits (currently 105 qubits) increases while the error rate rapidly decreases. It expands from 3x3 encoded qubits to 5x5 grids, and then to 7x7 grids, with each expansion halving the error rate. Moreover, Willow can perform real-time error correction, making it possible to scale to higher order qubits (such as 1050) in a short period of time.
The above two major breakthroughs, compared to performance improvement, have attracted more attention from scientists in terms of error correction capability.
Quantum computing joins, AI adds wings like a tiger
Quantum chips are the core of quantum computers. Willow's research and development team is the Google Quantum AI Laboratory led by Hartmut Neven. Hartmut stated that Willow is a big step towards large-scale, self correcting quantum computers, whose error correction capabilities and beyond classical computing power bring us closer to a system that can provide commercial applications, from helping discover new drugs, to designing more efficient electric vehicle batteries, to accelerating progress in nuclear fusion and new energy alternatives.
As the name Google Quantum AI Lab implies, quantum computing+artificial intelligence will be a feasible path for humanity to develop towards general artificial intelligence. The nuclear fusion research mentioned by Hartmut involves an extremely large and complex amount of computation that traditional computers cannot handle, but quantum computing is completely capable.
For example, there are concerns about the failure of the Scaling Law in recent large-scale model training, which is due to the huge investment and parameter growth, but cannot achieve corresponding results, causing AI giants like OpenAI to also fall into development bottlenecks. But Willow's emergence indicates that in the future, quantum computing will only be a small case for training large models with any parameters.
This is also the reason why Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Ultraman, and others like Willow. If large-scale, self correcting quantum chips are added to the artificial intelligence team, it greatly enhances the certainty of AGI arriving as scheduled. At the end of October this year, Musk stated during a discussion session on artificial intelligence at the "Future Investment Initiative" conference that the estimated time for AI to achieve all human comprehensive abilities (AGI) is around 2028 to 2029. And Ultraman also stated in a personal article at the end of September this year that super artificial intelligence may be born in the next "thousands of days".
Hartmut explained why the laboratory he founded in 2012 was named "(Google) Quantum Artificial Intelligence", stating that artificial intelligence and quantum computing will prove to be the most transformative technologies of our time, but advanced artificial intelligence will benefit greatly from quantum computing.
However, there is still controversy among some scientists regarding the performance definition of Google's latest quantum chip. Alan Woodward, a computer expert at the University of Surrey in the UK, said that Willow's appearance "inspired all those who strive to create practical quantum computers", but Google used performance testing tools specifically designed for quantum computers to develop this chip, so comparing its computing performance to traditional computers is inaccurate, "just like you can't compare apples and oranges together".
On December 13th, Academician Wang Jian, Director of Zhijiang Laboratory and Founder of Alibaba Cloud, also stated that Willow completed a very special task using a very specialized device. Whether it was an incredibly fast abacus or a calculation that truly surpassed today's (traditional computer) computing devices, it needs to be reconsidered, but we still have no answer to this question today.
How long until the era of quantum computing arrives?
The mutual assistance between AI and quantum computing will accelerate the large-scale commercialization process of quantum chips and quantum computers, but experts predict that it will also take 5-10 years. Hartmut acknowledges that quantum computers applied in commercial scenarios may not appear before 2030.
Willow's large-scale commercial use, especially for civilian use, may take some time. Scientists invented the world's first general-purpose computer in 1946, but it took 20-30 years for personal computers to be commercially available on a large scale.
In October 2019, the aforementioned Google Quantum AI team published their research results on "Quantum Supremacy" in the journal Nature, announcing the development of a 54 qubit quantum chip. At that time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai compared it to the first successful 12 second test flight when the Wright brothers invented the airplane. But the large-scale commercial use of airplanes will also be in 20-30 years.
Last November, Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun said in an interview with Adi Ignatius, the English editor in chief of Harvard Business Review, that quantum computers may take another ten or even twenty years to truly industrialize. On June 26, 2024, Huang Renxun once again stated at Nvidia's annual shareholder meeting that practical quantum computing will take decades to achieve. At that time, algorithms will be a combination of accelerated computation and quantum methods. However, when Huang Renxun made the above comments, Google Willow, which has significant industry breakthrough significance, had not yet emerged.
It is worth emphasizing that China is also at the forefront of quantum computing research in the world.
Recently, at the 2024 Digital Technology Ecology Conference, China Telecom Quantum Information Technology Group officially released the superconducting quantum computer "Tianyan 504". It is the largest quantum computing cluster in China, consisting of one 24 bit, two 176 bit, and one 504 bit quantum computers, and provides five types of world-class high-performance simulation machines and Cqlib quantum programming frameworks. Since China Telecom released the "Tianyan" quantum computing cloud platform in November 2023 and provided external services, it has received over 12 million visits from more than 50 countries worldwide, with more than 600000 experimental tasks. In addition, Academician Pan Jianwei, Vice President of the University of Science and Technology of China, has long been at the forefront of international research in the fields of quantum computing, quantum communication, and quantum encryption.
In January 2024, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and seven other departments issued the "Implementation Opinions on Promoting Future Industrial Innovation and Development", which included quantum information in future industrial planning. Quantum information technology includes three main aspects: quantum communication, quantum computing, and quantum encryption measurement.
On October 29th, Pan Jianwei stated at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Quantum Technology and Industry Conference that well-known companies such as Google and IBM, as well as some countries such as the UK and France, have proposed the goal of achieving 1 million quantum bits of coherent manipulation around 2035. "The same goal is also proposed in the national quantum technology related plan that China is currently preparing," Pan Jianwei revealed. It is understood that coherent manipulation of millions of quantum bits is an important way to achieve quantum information technology.
In the next 10 to 15 years, it is expected to achieve a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer with basic functions based on quantum error correction, and explore applications such as cryptanalysis and big data analysis. At that time, it can be called the arrival of the quantum computing era.
At that time, all encryption algorithm systems based on traditional computer foundations, including Bitcoin, needed to be reshaped. This is also the reason why Bitcoin fell sharply on the day of Willow's release. Of course, due to the long time left until the era of quantum computing, Bitcoin has resumed its upward trend after the stress.