Quote:While I said several months ago that we'd find a way to bring Moore's Law back, I didn't expect it to go down like this. In a new report in Quanta Magazine by Kevin Hartnett, Hartmut Neven, the director of Google's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, reveals that the growth in power with each new improvement to Google's best quantum processor is unlike anything found in nature. It's growing at not just an exponential rate, like in Moore's Law, but at a doubly-exponential rate, meaning we may be mere months away from the beginning of the practical quantum computing era.

Hartnett's piece should be a major wake-up call for the world. As we've plodded along, thinking that tomorrow would be more or less like today, something extraordinary appears to be taking place at Google's Quantum AI labs in Santa Barbara, California. In December 2018, Neven and his team began running a calculation on the company's best quantum processor when they began to see something unbelievable.

"They were able to reproduce the [quantum processor's] computation using a regular laptop," Hartnett writes. "Then in January, they ran the same test on an improved version of the quantum chip. This time they had to use a powerful desktop computer to simulate the result. By February, there were no longer any classical computers in the building that could simulate their quantum counterparts. The researchers had to request time on Google’s enormous server network to do that.