Photonics is proving to be a tough nut to crack

News Summary

  • Photonic chips could in theory lead to higher training performance because light produces less heat than electricity, can travel faster and is far less susceptible to changes in temperature and electromagnetic fields.Lightmatter, LightOn, Luminous Computing, Intel and NTT are among the companies developing photonic technologies.
  • CNBC, speaking to analysts and technologists, estimates the current cost of training a ChatGPT-like model from scratch to be over $4 million.One solution to the AI training dilemma that’s been proposed is photonic chips, which use light to send signals rather than the electricity that conventional processors use.
The growing compute power necessary to train sophisticated AI models such as OpenAIs ChatGPT might eventually run up against a wall with mainstream chip technologies.In a 2019 analysis, OpenAI fou [+1325 chars]