Chinese scientists claim quantum supremacy with a system that calculates in mins what would take a supercomputer 2B years, using tech different than Google's
Thirteen months after Google's Sycamore processor claimed quantum supremacy with a three-minute calculation, a Chinese team reports hitting the same milestone on hardware built differently from Google's — a task it says would take a conventional supercomputer two billion years. The claim matters because it shows the 2019 result was not a one-lab fluke but a repeatable threshold, now crossed by a second national program.
The milestone label itself is contested territory: physicists challenged D-Wave's later supremacy claim on its annealing processors by arguing classical machines could match it, so every new announcement now arrives pre-loaded with a verification fight.
First-order effects
China moves from follower to co-holder of the quantum-supremacy milestone, ending Google's status as the only team to have publicly claimed it and forcing Western labs to compare architectures rather than dismiss the field.
Second-order effects
Expect a classical-simulation counterattack mirroring what met D-Wave: rival researchers will try to show ordinary supercomputers can reproduce the Chinese result, since each supremacy claim is only as strong as the classical baseline it beats.
Third-order effects
If each new claim triggers the same verify-then-dispute cycle, 'quantum supremacy' hardens from a single breakthrough into a recurring scoreboard — and into a visible marker of US-China competition over who controls post-classical compute.
The trend: Quantum-advantage claims are multiplying across competing labs and hardware approaches, turning a once-single-company milestone into an international race with contested scoring.
@SamoBurja Scott Aaronson as always with a timely and informed take: https://www.scottaaronson.com/ ... It's not a fully-general universal quantum computer, but I'd say this one's noteworthy nonetheless. Per Aaronson: “Is BosonSampling at least a step toward universal quantum com…
You vs the experiment they told you not to worry about... Incredibly impressive results from @chaoyanglu and team - congratulations! It's an exciting day for photonics https://science.sciencemag.org/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Who wore it better? 😂 A new quantum advantage experiment, this time with photons! What a time to be alive! “Quantum computational advantage using photons”, https://science.sciencemag.org/ ... [Left, the GBS experiment (optical setup). Right: Google's Sycamore chip (superconductin…
While the world praises this historical result, I would also like to congratulate the authors on the choice of the title! Quantum computational advantage using photons https://science.sciencemag.org/ ...
China's leading quantum research group says its system produced results in minutes calculated to take more than 2 billion years of effort by the world's third-most-powerful supercomputer. https://www.wired.com/...
“...the authors responded, saying that they'd now verified their results up to n=40, but it burned $400,000 worth of supercomputer time ... This was by far the most expensive referee report I ever wrote!” Quantum supremacy via BosonSampling https://www.scottaaronson.com/ ...