Google CEO: 'Useful Quantum Computers Coming in 5-10 Years'

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google's parent company), predicted that "practically useful quantum computers will be possible in 5 to 10 years."

According to Bloomberg on the 12th (local time), CEO Pichai stated at the World Government Summit held in Dubai that "the current stage of quantum computers is similar to the early development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 2010s."

CEO Pichai explained, "At that time (2010s), we were making early progress with the Google Brain project."

Google Brain is an AI and deep learning research project started by Google in 2011. It took about 10 years to apply AI to various services starting with this project, and CEO Pichai sees the development of quantum computing technology as similar.

Pichai's outlook is more than 10 years ahead of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's forecast. Last month, CEO Huang said about the development of quantum computers, "If you say 15 years for very useful quantum computers, it might be the early stage, and 30 years might be the later stage."

Google aims to launch commercial quantum computing applications within 5 years. Last December, it announced that a quantum computer equipped with its self-developed quantum chip 'Willow' solved a problem in just 5 minutes that would take the world's fastest supercomputer, Frontier, 10 septillion years (10 to the power of 24 years) to solve.

Regarding the Chinese startup DeepSeek, CEO Pichai commented, "I think the DeepSeek team has done a very good job."

He mentioned last month that DeepSeek topped the download rankings on the Apple App Store and Google Play, saying, "It shows how fierce the global AI competition is," and "Google has learned a few lessons as well."

Yonghyun Shin, Hankyung.com reporter yonghyun@hankyung.com