What makes IBM's and Google's recent quantum computing milestones so significant?

The answer

In December 2023, IBM unveiled Condor, its first quantum processor exceeding 1,000 qubits (1,121 qubits), while simultaneously releasing Heron, a 133-qubit chip with dramatically lower error rates. Then in December 2024, Google announced Willow, a 105-qubit chip that achieved a groundbreaking milestone: for the first time, adding more qubits actually reduced errors rather than increasing them, solving the critical problem of quantum error correction that had plagued the field for 30 years. Willow performed a benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take the world's fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years. These developments signal the transition from experimental quantum computing to practical, scalable quantum systems for drug discovery, cryptography, and materials science.