Willow chips in

Tech companies have been working on quantum computing chips for years, but they are far from being useful. On Monday, Google revealed their latest chip called Willow. The chip takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for some of the world's fastest conventional computers to complete.

In previous chips, adding size increased power but also increased errors. With this new chip, Google has cracked the code, allowing the chip to become more powerful without increasing the error rate.

Given the speed of development, some researchers estimate that we could have useable quantum chips in the next five years. One use case, according to Google, is allowing MRI scans to be read in atom-level detail, unlocking new caches of data about human bodies and diseases for AI to process.

If you think AI has been a big change, quantum computing will be even more significant. The market agrees, Google was up over 5% yesterday.