Earlier this week, Google researchers announced a major computing breakthrough in the journal Nature:
Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times—our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years. This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum supremacy for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing paradigm.
Quantum supremacy heralds an era of not merely faster computing, but one in which computers can solve new types of problems. There was a time when I’d expect such breakthroughs from “information technology” companies such as IBM. But Google’s tech is ultimately in service to another business: advertising.