Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead of Google Quantum AI, stated this week that Willow's extraordinary performance—capable of performing in minutes tasks that would take supercomputers billions of years—could be explained by the concept of parallel universes.

In 2019, Google previously did a quantum computation in 200 seconds that would have taken the fastest supercomputer at that time 10,000 years. But IBM dismissed its claims, arguing that a classical computer could do the same calculation with greater "fidelity" in 2.5 days and argued that "quantum supremacy" had yet to be achieved.