Elon Musk impressed by Google's new quantum computing chip, Sundar Pichai says ‘we should do a…’

X owner Elon Musk was impressed by the launch of Google's new Willow quantum computing chipset. Google says the new ‘state of the art’ chip can reduce errors exponentially when scaling up and could have practical applications in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy and battery design. 

In a post announcing the launch of Willow, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, “Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field. In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would take a leading supercomputer over 10^25 years, far beyond the age of the universe.”

The Google Willow announcement drew a ‘Wow’ reaction from Musk which was soon followed by Pichai's reaction, writing, “We should do a quantum cluster in space with Starship one day.”

Musk wrote back, “That will probably happen. Any self-respecting civilization should at least reach Kardashev Type II. In my opinion, we are currently only at <5% of Type I. To get to ~30%, we would need to place solar panels in all desert or highly arid regions.”

Elon Musk listens in to Sundar Pichai's conversation with Donald Trump:

Prior to the current conversation, Musk had also reportedly listened to Pichai's congratulatory message to Donald Trump following his victory in the 2024 election. During the election campaign, Musk had complained about bias in Google searches, claiming that a search for Donald Trump returned news related to Kamala Harris.

What's more, Musk hasn't always had a positive reaction to Google's new launches. In fact, the Tesla CEO was highly critical of Google's acquisition of DeepMind and even tried to buy the AI startup himself. Musk's role as co-founder of OpenAI was also partly a reaction to the DeepMind acquisition and to create an alternative to Google in the AI field. However, Musk also had a falling out with OpenAI and later founded his own AI company, xAI.

In the past, Musk has been critical of Google's Gemini AI, going so far as to call it "racist" and "anti-civilisation". In April this year, Musk also warned that chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini could "end civilisation".