Google has unveiled a new quantum computer and is once more claiming to have pulled ahead in the race to show that these exotic machines can beat even the world's best conventional supercomputers – so does that mean useful quantum computers are finally here? Researchers at the tech giant were the first in the world to demonstrate this feat, known as quantum supremacy, with the announcement of the Sycamore quantum computing chip in 2019. But since then, supercomputers have caught up, leaving Sycamore behind. Now, Google has produced a new quantum chip, called Willow, which Julian Kelly at Google Quantum AI says is the firm's best yet. "You can think of this as having all the advantages of Sycamore, but if you were to look under the hood, we changed the geometry… we reimagined the processor," he says.

LLMs demonstrate an uncanny ability to process unstructured data, and as such, have the potential to go beyond search and run complex, semantic analyses at scale. We describe the design of an unstructured analytics system, Aryn, and the tenets and use cases that motivate its design. With Aryn, users can specify queries in natural language and the system automatically determines a semantic plan and executes it to compute an answer from a large collection of unstructured documents using LLMs. At the core of Aryn is Sycamore, a declarative document processing engine, built using Ray, that provides a reliable distributed abstraction called DocSets. Sycamore allows users to analyze, enrich, and transform complex documents at scale. Aryn also comprises Luna, a query planner that translates natural language queries to Sycamore scripts, and the Aryn Partitioner, which takes raw PDFs and document images, and converts them to DocSets for downstream processing. Using Aryn, we demonstrate a real world use case for analyzing accident reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and discuss some of the major challenges we encountered in deploying Aryn in the wild.

Quantum computing is an expensive and tricky affair. Even if one manages to accumulate all the funds to set up one QC, the exponential scaling in the number of quantum variables makes it difficult to find the exact solutions. It gets more challenging in the case of quantum chemical equations. The solution remains out of reach for modern classical computers. To address this, the AI Quantum team at Google, in their latest work, performed the largest chemical simulation on a quantum computer to date.

Here's a quick bit of topical multiple choice: What is "quantum supremacy?" If you answered c, you're correct -- except for the very afraid part. The fact is, quantum supremacy -- a term that is burning down the Internet today -- is really just an exceedingly fancy way of saying a super-duper kind of computer, one that not only operates on quantum principles, but masters them so deftly that it actually outperforms a traditional computer. Traditional silicon computers like the one you might be using to read this rely on chips that encode data in one of two states: 1 or 0. Gathered up and organized by the millions, billions and trillions, all those 1's and 0's take on meaning in the same way that the 8.3 million pixels in a 4K TV screen, or the who-know-how-many dots in a pointillist painting like George Seraut's masterpiece Sunday on La Grande Jatte, create a picture. But 1's and 0's are, by definition, binary things -- they are one or the other, but they can't be both.

BERLIN/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google said on Wednesday it had achieved a breakthrough in computing research by using a quantum computer to solve in minutes a complex problem that would take today's most powerful supercomputer thousands of years to crack. Google researchers expect that quantum computers within a few years will fuel advancements in fields such as artificial intelligence, materials science, and chemistry. The company is racing rivals including IBM Corp (IBM.N) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) to be the first to commercialize the technology and sell it through its cloud computing business. "We're hoping that when people start using this and looking at performance stability and cloud interface, they'll get really excited about what we have to offer at Google," John Martinis, the company's chief scientist for quantum hardware, told reporters. The breakthrough was described in a paper here published in science journal Nature. It followed weeks of controversy since a draft leaked over whether Google's claim of "quantum supremacy" was valid.

Here's a quick bit of topical multiple choice: What is "quantum supremacy?" If you answered c, you're correct -- except for the very afraid part. The fact is, quantum supremacy -- a term that is burning down the Internet today -- is really just an exceedingly fancy way of saying a super-duper kind of computer, one that not only operates on quantum principles, but masters them so deftly that it actually outperforms a traditional computer. Traditional silicon computers like the one you might be using to read this rely on chips that encode data in one of two states: 1 or 0. Gathered up and organized by the millions, billions and trillions, all those 1's and 0's take on meaning in the same way that the 8.3 million pixels in a 4K TV screen, or the who-know-how-many dots in a pointillist painting like George Seraut's masterpiece Sunday on La Grande Jatte, create a picture. But 1's and 0's are, by definition, binary things -- they are one or the other, but they can't be both.

Google's processor, Sycamore, performed a truly random-number generation in 200 seconds. The achievement marks a major breakthrough in the decadeslong quest to use quantum mechanics to solve computational problems. Google's processor, Sycamore, performed a truly random-number generation in 200 seconds. The achievement marks a major breakthrough in the decadeslong quest to use quantum mechanics to solve computational problems. Google says it has built a computer that is capable of solving problems that classical computers practically cannot.

Technical quarrels between quantum computing experts rarely escape the field's rarified community. Late Monday, though, IBM's quantum team picked a highly public fight with Google. In a technical paper and blogpost, IBM took aim at potentially history-making scientific results accidentally leaked from a collaboration between Google and NASA last month. That draft paper claimed Google had reached a milestone dubbed "quantum supremacy"--a kind of drag race in which a quantum computer proves able to do something a conventional computer can't. Monday, Big Blue's quantum PhD's said Google's claim of quantum supremacy was flawed.

This could be the dawn of a new era in computing. Google has claimed that its quantum computer performed a calculation that would be practically impossible for even the best supercomputer – in other words, it has attained quantum supremacy. If true, it is big news. Quantum computers have the potential to change the way we design new materials, work out logistics, build artificial intelligence and break encryption. That is why firms like Google, Intel and IBM – along with plenty of start-ups – have been racing to reach this crucial milestone.