China’s jiuzhang 4 optical quantum prototype, published in nature in may, runs a gaussian boson…
china’s jiuzhang 4 optical quantum prototype, published in nature in may, runs a gaussian boson sampling task about 1,054 times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer, finishing in seconds what classical machines would need hundreds of millions of years to do.
the gap between raw quantum speed and useful work has never looked wider.
Context
Verified date: Nature published Gaussian boson sampling with 1,024 squeezed states in 8,176 modes on May 13, 2026, and Xinhua reported the same day that Chinese scientists developed the programmable prototype Jiuzhang 4.0 as a new record for optical quantum information technology.
An earlier arXiv paper, Robust quantum computational advantage with programmable 3050-photon Gaussian boson sampling (Aug 2025), is the preprint line of this work.
The Nature publication in May 2026 matches. The 1,054 times faster figure and the hundreds of millions of years claim were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. in the excerpts read. The post names Jiuzhang 4 while Xinhua writes Jiuzhang 4.0. 'The gap between raw quantum speed and useful work has never looked wider' is the author's opinion.
Related work
- arXiv abstract: 3050-photon GBS ↗Aug 2025.
- exa.ai library: 3050-photon GBS publication ↗Author list and paper.
- Nature article ↗May 13, 2026.
Watch next
- Read the Nature paper for the speedup figure and its classical baseline.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 1 October 2026 at 14:48 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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