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What changed

Google reported that its 53-qubit Sycamore processor sampled random circuits in about 200 seconds and estimated that a supercomputer would need about 10,000 years. Classical methods later caught up: in 2022 a cluster of 512 GPUs did the same task in about 15 hours, and its authors estimated that a top supercomputer could do it in a few dozen seconds. The task was chosen to be hard for classical computers, not to be useful.

Sources: [1] [2]

Sources and review scope

Source-linked. Editorial review: .

  1. Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor ↗

    Arute et al., Nature (2019) · Accessed 2026-10-18 · Nature 574, 505–510

  2. Solving the sampling problem of the Sycamore quantum circuits ↗

    Pan, Chen and Zhang, Physical Review Letters (2022) · Accessed 2026-10-18

Keep exploring

Lesson · Research

How to read a quantum claim

Ask what was measured, against which alternative, and what the result does not establish.

Company · Superconducting circuits

Alphabet / Google Quantum AI

A quantum research program within a much larger advertising and cloud business.