• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 17, 2024

Google's quantum computing breakthrough will change online advertising and artificial intelligence.

The company launched Willow last week, but the advertising industry has not yet realized what this means for media buying, ad serving and personalization.

Think of how the advertising industry greeted programmatic and it will give you some idea of the transformation represented by Google's quantum computing chip Willow and the technology that follows -- and how this will change the industry.

Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in a blog post that this chip is “mind-boggling” in its speed -- and said it is one of the “first compelling examples of real-time error correction on a superconducting quantum system — crucial for any useful computation, because if you can’t correct errors fast enough, they ruin your computation before it’s done.”

Julian Kelly, director of hardware at Google Quantum AI, last week explained advancements in coherence times by a factor of 5 — from 20 microseconds in Sycamore to 100 microseconds in Willow.

Coherence time refers to the time that a qubit — the basic unit of information in quantum computing — can maintain its state without degradation.

Willow will change hardware performance. “A calculation that takes Willow under five minutes would take the fastest supercomputer 10 to 25 years,” he said in a video. “That’s a 1 with 25 zeros following it.”

Google has a fabrication facility in Santa Barbara that makes these chips, which can operate under the speed and error correction goals never before achieved in quantum computing.

It typically takes one to two seconds to auction, fill, and serve an ad, explained Nagu Gopalakrishnan, senior privacy product manager at ID5.

"If you are using a quantum computer, you would speed up the decision on which ads to serve," Gopalakrishnan said. "The user seeing an ad could still take 1 to 2 seconds due to network latency and other elements such as page load time. In this scenario, there may be a very small gain, but using such a quantum computer in ad decisions could improve ad matching and personalization decisions."

Gopalakrishnan said this technology also could help serve more ads in any given time period. One user will not see a noticeable difference unless quantum computers are lined across the network from ad servers to content delivery networks (CDNs). Google will make that happen one day.

More rapid ad matching and optimization speeds would improve media buying. Willow and quantum chips that follow could reduce the cost of serving an ad.

"Computational costs are heavily influenced by available memory," says Google. Based on estimates, it’s “important to consider a range of scenarios, from an ideal situation with unlimited memory to a more practical, embarrassingly parallelizable implementation on GPUs.”

The next challenge for Google will be to demonstrate a more “useful, beyond-classical" computation on these chips more relevant to a real-world application.

“We’re optimistic that the Willow generation of chips can help us achieve this goal,” Google said.

Google so far has achieved advancements in two separate types of experiments. It has run Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) benchmark that measures performance against classical computers but has no known real-world applications.

It also tested “interesting simulations of quantum systems, which have led to new scientific discoveries but are still within the reach of classical computers.”

Google’s goal is to do both in a stimulating manner — “to step into the realm of algorithms that are beyond the reach of classical computers and that are useful for real-world, commercially relevant problems."