IBM

Google debuted Willow, its latest quantum chip, on Wednesday, and if you’ve spent any time online since, you’ve undoubtedly run into some breathless reporting about it. Willow “crushes classical computers on a cosmic timescale,” proclaims one headline; Google “unveils ‘mind-boggling’ quantum computer chip,” reads another. It’s all anchored by a claim that Willow can complete a computation that would theoretically take a classical computer significantly more time than the 14 billion years the universe has existed. But, as you can probably guess, what the chip represents is not so simple.First, with Willow, Google makes no claim of quantum supremacy, something…