This Week in Tech: Google Reaches Quantum Supremacy, Zuckerberg Goes to Washington and More

Happy Friday everyone. It’s been a busy, wild week in the world of tech news. But don’t worry – we’re here to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Here’s a rundown of the top stories our PR teams have been paying attention to:

Say hello to quantum supremacy

Google says that it has built a machine that needs only 200 seconds to solve a problem that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to figure out. This is a breakthrough called “quantum supremacy” and could eventually usher in the rise of quantum computers, which will be far more powerful than our regular, puny, modern-day computers by leveraging quantum mechanics.

IBM threw some shade at Google, releasing a blog post claiming that the simulated task wouldn’t take 10,000 years on a regular computer – it would actually take just 2.5 days.

Zuckerberg goes to Washington

Earlier this month, I wrote about some tough times for Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency, Libra, as major partners like Mastercard, Visa and Stripe were about to quit the project. Well, it’s only gotten worse from there. Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, and to almost no one’s surprise, lawmakers came away as skeptical as ever regarding Libra’s regulation and governance structure.

SoftBank bails out WeWork

On Tuesday, SoftBank announced its planned WeWork bailout. Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann will be walking away with almost $1.7 billion, as the company he founded was running out of money and couldn’t even afford severance packages for the thousands of employees that were about to be laid off. I’d recommend this piece in the Wall Street Journal, which details what lead to this epic fall from grace: The Fall of WeWork: How a Startup Darling Came Unglued

Is TikTok a national security threat?

Two senators have called for US intelligence officials to investigate Chinese-owned social networking app TikTok to determine if it poses a threat to our national security.

Gartner’s top tech trends for 2020

At this week’s Gartner IT Symposium, the analyst firm unveiled its top 10 strategic technology trends for next year. Hyperautomation took the top spot, followed by multi-experience, democratization of expertise, human augmentation, transparency/traceability, edge computing, distributed cloud, autonomous things, practical blockchain and AI security.

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