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Artificial intelligence accelerated by light

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence calls for rapidly increasing computing power. Two reported photonic processors could meet these power requirements and revolutionize artificial-intelligence hardware.
  1. Huaqiang Wu

    1. Huaqiang Wu is at the Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

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  2. Qionghai Dai

    1. Qionghai Dai is in the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming various fields, such as clinical diagnosis, autonomous driving and speech translation. However, the quickly increasing volume of data in modern society poses great challenges for the electronic computing hardware used in AI, in terms of both computing speed and power consumption. Such issues have become a major bottleneck for AI. Writing in Nature, Xu et al.1 and Feldmann et al.2 report photonic processors that accelerate AI processing by harnessing the distinctive properties of light. These demonstrations could inspire a renaissance of optical computing.

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Nature 589, 25-26 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03572-y

References

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