Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Google's parent company Alphabet, predicted on the 12th (local time) that "practically useful" quantum computers could be possible within 5 to 10 years.
According to Bloomberg News, Pichai noted this during the World Governments Summit held in Dubai, comparing the current state of quantum computing to the early development stage of artificial intelligence (AI) in the early 2010s.
He explained, "The current stage of quantum computing technology is similar to the early stage of AI development in the 2010s," adding, "At that time, we achieved early results through the Google Brain project, and it took about 10 years to apply AI to various services." Google has been conducting the 'Google Brain' project for AI and deep learning research since 2011.
Pichai's outlook is significantly faster than Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, who predicted it would take more than 20 years for "useful" quantum computers to emerge. Huang said last month, "If we consider the emergence of a very useful quantum computer to be about 15 years away, that would be the early stage, and it would take about 30 years for the later stage."
Following his remarks, the stock price of IonQ, a company developing quantum computing technology, plummeted 41% in a single day, along with a sharp decline in the stock prices of related corporations.
Google is one of the leading corporations in the field of quantum computing. In December of last year, it announced that its self-developed quantum chip 'Willow' enabled a quantum computer to solve a problem that would take the fastest existing supercomputer, Frontier, 10 septillion years (10 to the power of 24 years), in just 5 minutes during an experiment.
Google aims to launch commercial quantum computing applications within 5 years. Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI, predicted in an interview on the 5th that "commercial applications that can only be implemented on quantum computers will emerge within 5 years."