Google, in its never-ending quest to casually redefine reality, unveiled its latest quantum computing chip, Willow, on Monday. Sure, the chip is allegedly fast and reliable—yawn, tech stuff—but the real headline? Google basically just announced that parallel universes exist. Oh, and that we all live in a multiverse. No biggie.
Hartmut Neven, founder of Google Quantum AI, decided to sprinkle a little existential dread into his blog post by claiming that Willow is so mind-blowingly fast it couldn’t possibly operate within our humble little universe. Nope, it’s apparently siphoning computational power from other universes. Cue the sci-fi movie soundtrack.
🛸 The Bold Claim
Here’s Neven’s mic-drop moment:
“Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take the fastest supercomputer about 10 septillion years. That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years if you’re keeping count. Oh, and by the way, this impossibly large number exceeds known timescales in physics and the age of the universe itself. So yeah, multiverse confirmed.”
Totally normal Monday morning, right?
🌍 The Internet Reacts
Predictably, the internet responded in two camps:
Team "Finally, Science Fiction is Real": Some people—presumably with PhDs and an alarming amount of free time—argued that Neven might actually be onto something.
Team "Nice Try, Google": Others, including skeptics with a working grasp of reality, pointed out that these wild claims are based on a benchmark Google invented. Convenient, huh?
🧑🔬 Quantum Computing for Dummies
For the uninitiated, quantum computers use qubits, which can be 0, 1, or both at the same time (because why not). They also leverage “quantum entanglement,” a spooky action-at-a-distance thing Einstein side-eyed for years.
In theory, this makes quantum computers capable of solving problems too complex for classical computers. In reality, they’re also error-prone divas that need a lot of coddling.
🤔 So, What’s the Catch?
Willow’s mission, apparently, was to reduce those pesky errors, and Neven claims it’s a smashing success. But skeptics aren’t buying the multiverse pitch just yet. After all, proving the existence of parallel universes by solving Google’s own benchmark problem is like declaring yourself a genius because you aced a quiz you wrote.
🌠 The Takeaway
Google’s new chip might be fast. It might even be reliable. But did it really tap into alternate dimensions to prove we’re all part of some cosmic choose-your-own-adventure? Jury’s still out. For now, maybe keep the existential crises to a minimum. You might need that brainpower when the next chip unlocks time travel.
Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip
Our new quantum chip demonstrates error correction and performance that paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.
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