Google is making breakthroughs much bigger than AI
rise of ChatGPT and the supposed ground Google is losing to Microsoft and OpenAI in the search wars has overshadowed more important developments in computing, progress which will have far greater implications than which website serves up better tax advice.
To date, all computing is done on a binary scale. A piece of information is stored as either one or zero, and these binary units are clumped together for further calculation. We need four bits to store the number eight , for example. It’s slow and clunky, but at least it’s simple and accurate. Silicon chips have been holding and processing bits for almost seven decades.
Quantum bits — qubits — can store data in more than two forms . That means larger chunks of information can be processed in a given amount of time. Among the many downsides is that the physical manifestation of a qubit requires super-cold temperatures — just above zero degrees Kelvin — and are susceptible to even the minutest amount of interference such as light. They’re also error prone, which is a big problem in computing.
Google had theorised that clumping a larger number of physical qubits to form a single logical qubit would reduce error rate. In its research paper, outlined in a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai, the team found that a logical qubit formed from 49 physical qubits did indeed outperform one comprised of 17.In reality, dedicating 49 qubits to the handling of just a single logical one sounds inefficient and even overkill.
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