Google has unveiled a new chip that it says represents a major breakthrough in quantum computing, an area seen as the next challenge for many tech companies.

Although Google’s successes as a pioneer in the field are well-known, experts say quantum computing still has no real-world use – yet.

“We need a quantum ChatGPT moment,” Francesco Ricciuti, an associate at venture capital firm Runa Capital, told CNBC on Tuesday, pointing to OpenAI’s chatbot that is credited with driving the artificial intelligence boom. “It probably isn’t.”

Proponents of quantum computing claim it will be able to solve problems that current computers cannot solve.

In classical computing, information is stored in bits. Each bit is either a one or a zero. Quantum computing uses quantum bits, or qubits, which can be zero, one, or anything in between.

The theory is that quantum computers will be able to process much larger amounts of data, leading to potential breakthroughs in fields such as medicine, science and finance.

Google announced Willow, its latest quantum chip, on Monday.

“The more qubits you use, the more errors usually occur and the system becomes classical,” wrote Hartmut Neven, founder of Google Quantum AI, in a blog post.

Willow can reduce errors “exponentially” as the number of qubits is increased, the US tech giant said, addressing “a key challenge in quantum error correction that has dogged the field for nearly 30 years.”

Google measured Willow’s performance using the so-called RCS (Random Circuit Sampling) benchmark, which is a computational task that is difficult for classic computers to solve.

Willow performed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, Google said.

“This staggering number exceeds known time scales in physics and far exceeds the age of the universe,” Neven said.

According to Winfried Hensinger, professor of quantum technologies at the University of Sussex, Google’s Willow chip has demonstrated a “new milestone in the way quantum computers can deal with errors that arise during their operation.”

“Your technique becomes more effective at reducing errors the more additional qubits are used to correct those errors. This is a very important milestone for quantum computing.”

But despite optimism that quantum computing could one day change the world – or at least the role of computers in it – experts in the field have suggested that Google’s quantum computing breakthrough is still not being used in the real world.

Runa Capital’s Ricciuti said Google’s claims of success are “based on tasks and benchmarks that are not really useful for practical cases.”

“They’re trying to define a really challenging problem for regular computers that they can solve with quantum computers. It’s amazing that they can do that, but that doesn’t really mean it’s useful,” Ricciuti added.

Hensinger said Willow is “still far too small to perform useful calculations” and that quantum computers would need “millions of qubits” to solve really important industrial problems. Willow has 105 qubits.

Meanwhile, Google’s chip is based on superconducting qubits, a technology that requires intensive cooling, which could be a limiting factor in scaling.

“It may be fundamentally difficult to build quantum computers with such a large number of qubits using superconducting qubits, since cooling so many qubits to the required temperature – close to absolute zero – would be difficult or impossible,” Hensinger said.

Nevertheless, both Hensinger and Ricciuti agree that Google’s developments increase enthusiasm for quantum computing and further development in this area.

“This result increases confidence that humanity will be able to build practical quantum computers that enable some of the powerful applications that quantum computers are known for,” Hensinger said.