Google’s quantum chip Willow can save you 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years

If you’ve ever felt slow at anything – reading, learning, finishing a trendy streaming series – take comfort in knowing that at least you are not one of today’s fastest supercomputers. The machines boastful enough to suffix themselves “super” have been dealt a devastating blow by a quantum chip named Willow, unveiled this week by Google.

Google says its new chip performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years – per a blog by Hartmut Neven, founder and lead of Google Quantum AI, “a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.”

Neven says that when he founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, “the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics – the ‘operating system’ of nature to the extent we know it today – to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges.”

Now, with Willow putting today’s fastest supercomputers to absolute shame, he says the path toward commercially relevant applications is significantly shorter.

Roughly, that is, around ten septillion years shorter. Neven says this “mind-boggling number” beyond comprehensible timescales “lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”

If Google taking the world into a multiverse with the blast of a press release sounds a bit like playing god, the paranoid will not be encouraged by Google’s visual framing of the Willow chip as a shining monolith hovering over a windblown beach.

Best time for quantum resiliency is now: Karl Holmqvist

The announcement of a chip that makes today’s fastest supercomputers look like indolent slugs sent ripples across the breadth of the tech industry – but particularly professions that rely on cryptography. Quantum computing has been flagged as a potentially existential threat to all known cryptographic technology, a universal breaker that could reset data security back to factory settings – the next Y2K. Some estimates say that scenario is likely within about five years. But no one knows for sure.

Enter the concept of “quantum resiliency” and post-quantum cryptography. If biometrics and other identity data are to be kept safe from the quantum scourge, it has to be made resilient to the threat.

In an email to Biometric Update, Karl Holmqvist, CEO of quantum-resilient identity provider Lastwall, says “we are significantly closer to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer than many people believe, and the rate of development is accelerating.”

Lastwall, which is based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, works on critical infrastructure, government and defense use cases, primarily for the U.S. and European markets. Needless to say, security is core to its business.

Holmqvist says he can understand skeptics who have a hard time buying the complete collapse of asymmetric cryptographic systems that secure all the world’s data. But “in the last 24 months, we’ve seen significant milestones and breakthroughs across a variety of architectural approaches to building scalable quantum computers that are fault tolerant.”

What that means (literally) is probably up for debate. But Holmqvist says the real question revolves around that too-common human feeling of being too late. “Would you rather understand the implications of post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) deployments, test them in your environments, and be prepared to rapidly deploy when needed,” he asks. “Or risk losing your secrets?”

Speaking on the ID Talk podcast, Holmqvist says the tools to tackle the new quantum reality are emerging, Holmqvist says. “The rise of FIDO 2 and the idea of things like passkeys and biometrically bound passkeys that are stirred in TPMs, that gives us a new set of tools that become the primary way to do things.”

Willow is the size of an After Eight, probably tastes worse

At the very end of Hartmut Neven’s post about Willow, he makes space for a sentence on its potential benefits: “helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives.” Reporting on Willow has tended to focus on the technical achievement the chip represents – the sheer speed and power and unfathomability contained in an object that has been described as “about the dimensions of an After Eight mint.”

So far, there has not been much apparent discussion of whether or not we need a Willow in our lives. As often happens with cutting-edge tech, it is presented as an inevitability, too far established by the time it reaches the public eye to be contained. Neven, who left AI to work in quantum, says “advanced AI will significantly benefit from access to quantum computing.”

Increasingly, the benefits of the most advanced tech appear to be shared between machines. So if the laundry takes a few extra days, don’t sweat it.

Article Topics

cryptography  |  data protection  |  Google  |  Lastwall  |  post-quantum cryptography  |  quantum chip  |  quantum computing  |  Willow