Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
Interesting supposition. The multiverse is just a hypothesis, there’s no proof the concept is real, so this idea is more in the realm of metaphysics than real science. Still, humanity doesn’t understand the quantum world yet, and it is building tech that utilizes it.
On the opposite end of the scale is dark energy & dark matter, which shows we don’t really understand the universe at the macro scale either, yet we’ve been existing in it for millenia. Whatever is real, is just as real as it ever was, whether we understand it or not.
So perhaps this extra computational power is coming from “somewhere” we don’t understand. If you thought AGI was scary, AGI powered by computing coming from a mysterious unknown “somewhere” sounds even more troubling.
Eh, we understand it pretty well. We don’t understand why it is, or how it meshes with general relativity, but quantum mechanics is a well established field at this point.