Google's Willow Quantum Chip Impresses Elon Musk, Chat With Sundar Pichai Goes Viral

The conversation between Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai on Alphabet Inc.'s Willow quantum chip has taken social media by storm on the chance that the partnership for a quantum cluster in space via the new "breakthrough chip" will "probably happen."

Google's new "state-of-the-art quantum computing chip"—Willow—made a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially if scaled up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field, Sundar Pichai said in a post on X.

"In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would take a leading supercomputer over 10^25 years, far beyond the age of the universe(!)."

Taking interest in the new breakthrough, SpaceX CEO Musk replied, "Wow", after with Pichai suggested, "We should do a quantum cluster in space with Starship one day."

Musk replied: “That will probably happen,” and discussed a cosmic philosophy, referencing Kardashev scale. "Any self-respecting civilization should at least reach Kardashev Type II. In my opinion, we are currently only at <5% of Type I. To get to ~30%, we would need to place solar panels in all desert or highly arid regions."

"Indeed. We should scale solar so much more, amazing that we keep looking at alternatives when the most obvious path is staring at our eyes, literally!," Pichai responded.

In 2019, IBM disputed Google's claims that its quantum chip solved a problem that would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years, arguing that, with different technical assumptions about a classical system, the problem might be resolved in two and a half days.

Google stated in a blog post that it considered some of those worries when making its most recent projections. Google said that even in the best-case scenario, a traditional computer would still require a billion years to achieve the same outcomes as its most recent chip.