Could Computing With Light Finally Make AI Profitable?

A paper published this week in the journal Science Advances demonstrates an optical computing concept that could greatly accelerate AI, while reducing energy costs and heat production. Intriguingly, it does all this by way of an "infinity mirror."

Optical computers have several intrinsic advantages, provided they work. Not only does light move very quickly, reducing latency, but it can also encode information in multiple ways. By encoding information in light's wavelength, phase, polarization state, and more, an optical computer can greatly increase data bandwidth compared to pure electronic systems.

Light can even be split and recombined in ways that mimic complex mathematical operations, physically dividing, transforming, and summing waves as a stand-in for doing the same operations on abstract numbers. Light has inherent parallelism, meaning it can be split and recombined to perform precisely the matrix multiplications needed for neural networks.

However, to organize these math operations so they ...