AI at light speed: How glass fibers could replace silicon brains
Imagine supercomputers that think with light instead of electricity. That s the breakthrough two European research teams have made, demonstrating how intense laser pulses through ultra-thin glass fibers can perform AI-like computations thousands of times faster than traditional electronics. Their system doesn t just break speed records it achieves near state-of-the-art results in tasks like image recognition, all in under a trillionth of a second.
Researchers at Aalto University have demonstrated single-shot tensor computing at the speed of light, a remarkable step towards next-generation artificial general intelligence hardware powered by optical computation rather than electronics.
Researchers at Tsinghua University developed the Optical Feature Extraction Engine (OFE2), an optical engine that processes data at 12.5 GHz using light rather than electricity. Its integrated diffraction and data preparation modules enable unprecedented speed and efficiency for AI tasks. Demonstrations in imaging and trading showed improved accuracy, lower latency,…