A Quantum Leap 🌍💡

👀 TLDR:

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover Google’s massive breakthrough in quantum chips. Willow can do in a few minutes what ordinary supercomputers might take millennia to achieve. It really is a fascinating new dawn. We also have news on OpenAI’s ‘Shipmas,’ the clock ticking on TikTok, Meta’s new leaner Llama model, a new startup from the guys behind NotebookLM, and more!

🎬 Our Top Take

🖥️ 🍪 Google – Massive Breakthrough with Willow Quantum Chip

The main item discussion on tech socials right now is not OpenAI’s ’12 Days of Shipmas’ (see below) or the end of TikTok (also below), but Google’s Willow – a breakthrough quantum computer chip with world-changing potential. Google used the chip to solve a complex computational problem in five minutes, claiming that the same problem would take an ‘ordinary’ supercomputer 10 septillion years to solve. Experts have suggested that the quantum chips could help with many things, ranging from curing cancer to solving climate change to breaking unbreakable codes. The chip has caused a bit of a panic in the crypto sector, too, with some Bitcoin holders being spooked into believing this heralds an era where seed phrases (the extra-strong crypto passwords) could be brute-forced. While impressive, Google stresses that these chips are years away from commercial use, so you aren’t suddenly gonna find one in your Pixel phone. But it’s nice to see that a Big Tech company can still wow us once in a while. And wow us they did here. #WillowWow Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: Perplexity Shopping

You’ll have heard us talk about Perplexity many times in the past, but we have chosen it as our App of the Week due to one helpful feature, particularly at this time of year – its shopping assistant. Perplexity as a shopping tool is pretty neat, as it can provide product overviews, perform visual searches, discuss pros and cons, search around the web for the best prices, and even check out your purchases without leaving the Perplexity app. It also doubles up as a kind of consumer advice guru. There’s even free shipping with “Buy with Pro” for Perplexity Pro subscribers. Get more details on it here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 25%

📈📉 Google – Questions About the Continued Relevance of Year in Search It’s that time of year when Google releases all the trends of 2024 acquired from its search data. Liam Payne and CrowdStrike were among the big trends this year, but some have called into question the usefulness of Year in Search. Gen-Z, for instance, uses Google about 25% less than previous generations, preferring to discover information through platforms like TikTok. As such, some have called for Google to start blending in other data from the likes of YouTube and, of course, Gemini. Only then will we get a real impression of the year’s trends. #YearInSearch Read more here.

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

Forget 12 days of Christmas. We’re doing 30 days of 3Advance.  Here’s a sneak peek at the new offer we’re officially launching in January. We’re opening up Rapid Application Development sprints every month in 2025. We merge our experience, expertise, and AI-powered tools to build v1 apps for new clients. 30 for 30, you say? Exactly. 30 days. $30k. One very focused deliverable: your app v1. To skip the queue, hit us up today.

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