A Race Between Lightmatter and Lightelligence
There’s a law that most technology people are familiar with called “ Moore’s Law” which states that the number of transistors on a computer chip will double every 18 months or so. This refers to the exponential growth in computing which helps explain why that smartphone in your pocket contains exponentially more computing power than what was used to put man on the moon. There’s also a lesser known law that says the number of people who claim Moore’s Law is dead, also doubles every 18 months. That’s because even with the power of nanotechnology being harnessed to etch out even smaller transistors, we’re starting to reach certain technological limitations. This is where something called “ optical computing” may be the way forward.
Without getting all technical here, traditional computing uses electrons to perform computations. On the other hand, optical computing proposes to use photons to perform computations instead. Since photons are the fundamental particles of light, it’s easy to see why we would call this “optical computing”, in other words, computers powered by light. Even the nomenclature spells this out. One is called electronics and the other is called photonics. Current applications of photonics are where we combine both electronics and photonics for things like fiber optics where we can use light to send data over long distances at a much higher volume and rate of speed.
When it comes to traditional computing applications however, scientists are having problems developing the components necessary to make “pure optical computing” a reality. That’s why the recent news of a company called Lightmatter came as a bit of a surprise. Lightmatter wants to use optical computing to create new artificial intelligence chips.
If you’re holding shares of Nvidia ( NASDAQ:NVDA), you’re a happy camper so far as they’ve risen an astounding +1,831% over the past 5 years and continue their climb as we type this. That’s because NVDA has had a “perfect storm” situation where their GPUs are being used in all kinds of high-growth applications like autonomous driving, gaming, and of course artificial intelligence. While other types of chips like FPGAs have had some traction for use in AI applications, so far NVDA has dominated this space. Of course that’s led to the emergence of many startups trying to get a piece of the action. We looked at a number of these in our article on 12 AI Hardware Startups Building New AI Chips, and CB Insights estimates that there at least 45 startups working on building new chips for artificial intelligence. One most of the most recent players to emerge is the aforementioned Lightmatter.
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