A key problem facing artificial intelligence (AI) development is the vast amount of energy the technology requires, with some experts projecting AI datacenters to be responsible for over 13% of global electricity usage by 2028. According to Xingjie Ni, associate professor of electrical engineering at the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the key to addressing this roadblock could lie in computers powered by light instead of circuitry.
Ni and his team recently developed a prototype device that can accelerate and dramatically reduce the energy cost of AI computation, which they detailed in a paper published in Science Advances. Their system routes light through an "infinity mirror"-like loop of tiny optical elements, encoding data directly into the beams of light and capturing the resulting light patterns with a microscopic camera. AI models powered by this light-processing unit run faster and require far less energy than conventional electronic computing systems to complete tasks and perform calculations.
In the following Q&A, Ni discusses optical computing, how this new approach is more efficient than previous optical systems, and the impact this research could have on the future of AI and computing technology.
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