[DigitalToday reporter Choo Hyun-woo] Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai (순다르 피차이) likened quantum computing to the stage AI was at five years ago. On June 2 local time, IT outlet TechRadar reported that Pichai made the assessment in a BBC interview late last year on the state of quantum technology progress across the industry.

Competition in quantum computing has recently heated up, led by big tech companies and university researchers. Google is taking part in advancing quantum computing technology alongside IBM, Amazon and others.

The industry’s goal is a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer. Simply increasing the number of qubits is not enough. Qubits are far more vulnerable to errors than conventional computing bits, meaning calculations can collapse before producing useful results without proper error correction.

For that reason, the key task is error correction. Only by building a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer can it process useful real-world calculations faster than the fastest supercomputers.

Google first achieved below-threshold error correction in December 2024. That means it has, in theory, entered a stage where adding qubits reduces errors rather than increasing them.

Still, that result alone does not allow a firm conclusion that Google will be the first to create quantum computing’s ChatGPT moment within the next five years. That is because multiple industry participants are making similar breakthroughs.

Pichai pointed out that five years ago AI was closer to a term referring to simple machine-learning functions and neural-network-based research projects, but has now come to mean a broad set of technologies reshaping society. Quantum computing is also expected to change multiple fields through powerful processing capabilities, but many current use cases remain in research and science.