Artificial intelligence accelerated by light

[erek]

"Given the challenges facing conventional electronic computing approaches, it is exciting to see the emergence of integrated photonics as a potential successor to achieve unprecedented performance for future computing architectures. However, building a practical optical computer will require extensive interdisciplinary efforts and collaborations between researchers in materials science, photonics, electronics and so on. Although the reported photonic processors have high computing power per unit area and potential scalability, the all-optical computing scale (the number of optical artificial neurons) remains small. Moreover, the energy efficiency is limited by the presence of computing elements that inherently absorb light and because electrical and optical signals frequently need to be interconverted.

Another avenue of research is the development of advanced nonlinear integrated photonic computing architectures, rather than one- or two-dimensional linear convolutions. By integrating electronic circuits and thousands or millions of photonic processors into a suitable architecture, a hybrid optical–electronic framework that takes advantage of both photonic and electronic processors could revolutionize AI hardware in the near future. Such hardware would have important applications in areas such as communication, data-centre operation and cloud computing."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03572-y

 

[learners permit]

This ties in with another nature article I posted a bit ago. Exciting stuff going on here that's for sure. More specically with possible error correction of quantum computers.