Quantum Advantage.

The swamp gets rich.

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1. Bethany Allen and Jenny Wong Leung:

China is already surpassing the United States in science and technology research. Chinese students no longer need to go to America for world-class research experience in the fields that will shape our future. Barring China’s best minds from American campuses will only drive more of them into a Chinese academic research system increasingly integrated with the country’s defense sector and geared toward building national power.

Data compiled by our teams at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suggests that U.S. universities trail their Chinese counterparts in cutting-edge research in dozens of emerging technologies. We have combed through millions of scientific papers indexed on Web of Science, one of the world’s most comprehensive databases of peer-reviewed studies, to identify the most influential and high-impact research. We’ve then used that data to rank universities around the world in 64 critical technologies.

Our findings are striking.

China takes the No. 1 spot globally in 57 of those fields. In most of them, Chinese schools don’t just take the top slot; they dominate the top 10. (Sources: aspi.org.au, ad-aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com, nytimes.com)

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2. China is quickly becoming the global leader in nuclear power, with nearly as many reactors under construction as the rest of the world combined. While its dominance of solar panels and electric vehicles is well known, China is also building nuclear plants at an extraordinary pace. By 2030, China’s nuclear capacity is set to surpass that of the United States, the first country to split atoms to make electricity. Many of China’s reactors are derived from American and French designs, yet China has overcome the construction delays and cost overruns that have bogged down Western efforts to expand nuclear power. At the same time, China is pushing the envelope, making breakthroughs in next-generation nuclear technologies that have eluded the West. The country is also investing heavily in fusion, a potentially limitless source of clean power if anyone can figure out how to tame it. (Source: nytimes.com)

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3. Google Quantum AI:

Today, powered by our high-performance quantum chip, Willow, we have achieved the first-ever demonstration of verifiable quantum advantage. This milestone is a critical step toward realizing useful quantum computation, a feat made possible by the precision and speed engineered into our quantum hardware systems….

These high-precision quantum gates enabled us to perform the highly complex Quantum Echoes algorithms, involving large-scale quantum interferences and entanglement. It concretely placed our results in a regime beyond the capabilities of classical computers.

Furthermore, this precision is matched by the fact that our system can perform millions of Quantum Echoes measurements in just tens of seconds. This speed was instrumental in enabling a staggering one trillion measurements over the course of this project—a significant portion of all measurements ever performed on all quantum computers combined. This solidifies our work as one of the most complex experiments in the history of quantum computing. (Sources: blog.google, nature.com, italics mine.)