Inside Quantum Technology

A Review of Quantum Computing Rivals’ Reactions to Google’s Quantum Supremacy Announcement

(SpectrumIEEE) This article recounts the Google’s quantum supremacy announcement and the reactions from rivals. Overall, the description includes a positive assessment from Scott Aaronson, Director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin, “Any advance among all the competing quantum computing efforts represents good news for the field overall. After all, no research group has demonstrated a fully error-corrected and fault-tolerant quantum computer—one of the next big milestones that would also help enable truly practical quantum computing.”
Days before Google’s official announcement, IBM uploaded a paper claiming to show how the Summit supercomputer could pull off the quantum circuit sampling in just 2.5 days rather than thousands of years.
Intel, another quantum computing rival, issued a more congratulatory press release that praised Google’s quantum supremacy demonstration. But Intel also took the opportunity to suggest that quantum computing architecture based on spin qubits may have an advantage over Google’s superconducting qubit approach when scaling up the size of quantum computing devices.
A more oblique response came from a Chinese research team that uploaded its own paper to coincide with Google’s quantum supremacy announcement. The Chinese experiment seemed to demonstrate another possible path toward achieving quantum supremacy by using a “boson sampling” approach based on the interaction and measurement of photon particles.
Google already has its eyes on that next milestone because its Sycamore device was designed to incorporate error correction techniques such as surface code.

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