It was the year-end story that captivated many but eluded most: “Willow [a quantum processor] performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10²⁵) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” Google researchers announced in a blog post in December. One thing, at least, was very clear: Willow, which took five years to develop, can do things far beyond the reach of the typical laptop