Google's 200-second quantum supremacy claim crumbled to 2.5 days within a week
thisguyknowsai · x · 2026-10-05
A retrospective on Google's 2019 quantum supremacy claim: the 53-qubit Sycamore chip sampled a random circuit in 200 seconds, with Google claiming the Summit supercomputer would need 10,000 years. IBM pushed back within days, arguing smarter use of disk storage could do it in 2.5 days; later GPU-based methods allegedly reproduced it in hours. The task itself had no real-world use. Google's 2024 Willow chip (105 qubits) delivered genuine error-correction progress, but the author argues no useful quantum advantage has held up to scrutiny yet.
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