Crunch Time for AI: Photonic Chips Enter the Menu
TL;DR for operators Photonic AI chips are not “GPUs, but shiny.” That is the lazy version, and as usual the lazy version is slightly wrong in the most expensive place. The practical story is narrower and more useful. Two recent Nature papers show that photonic systems can now do more than charming lab tricks. Hua et al.’s PACE system demonstrates a 64 × 64 photonic matrix-vector accelerator with more than 16,000 photonic components, low-latency optical multiply–accumulate operations, and strong performance on Ising-style optimisation workloads.1 Ahmed et al. demonstrate a photonic AI processor capable of running real neural-network workloads, including ResNet, BERT, and Atari reinforcement learning, with near-electronic precision across many tasks.2 ...