I’ve suspected for a few years now that optoelectronics is where this is all headed. It’s exciting to watch as important foundations are set on that path, and this was one of them.
I’ve suspected for a few years now that optoelectronics is where this is all headed. It’s exciting to watch as important foundations are set on that path, and this was one of them.
Yes. It’s using light instead of electricity.
Which has advantages in multiple aspects.
Pretty much every major technical college’s research/VC groups are making a photonics AI play right now.
One of the physicists at NIST suggested a few years ago that AGI would only occur in photonic neural networks because of the ability to better model the neuron in light vs electricity.
ML in particular is a great fit for the quantum effects of light too, given that in-process accuracy doesn’t matter, some degree of jitter is typically desired, and the network is a black box anyways so not being able to observe intermediate processing wouldn’t be a problem.
This work isn’t really playing with those effects yet (would need entirely new ways of training models), but it’s the fourth the road promise that’s probably the most exciting IMO.