Google’s Willow quantum chip has achieved a critical milestone known as «going below threshold» in error reduction. The breakthrough means that as the team adds more physical qubits to the error-correcting code, the resulting logical qubit becomes more reliable — errors decrease exponentially, rather than increasing. This is a foundational requirement for building a truly useful, fault-tolerant quantum computer. To illustrate the potential, Google ran the «Quantum Echoes» algorithm on Willow, and it completed the task approximately 13,000 times faster than the world’s best supercomputer. This verifiable speedup clears a path for applying quantum technology to challenging fields like medicine and materials science within the next five years.
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