AI Needs Enormous Computing Power. Could Light-Based Chips Help?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-needs-enormous-computing-power-could-light-based-chips-help-20240520/

by jolieli • 2 years ago

45 40 2 years ago

quantamagazine.org

seanc4• 2 years ago

A wise person once said "Bosons are for transport and fermions are for switching."

neon_me• 2 years ago

please, eli5 <3

seanc4• 2 years ago

ly5: The universe is made of two kinds of particles, Bosons and Fermions. Light is a boson. Most of the stuff we touch is made of Fermions. Electricity is fermions also.

Bosons, like light, don't like to interact with things. They just want to go places, as fast as they possibly can. So if you want a particle to carry information from point A to point B, light is great. Point it in the right direction and off it goes, and it won't interact with anything unless it absolutely as to.

Fermions, like electrons, love bumping into each other and changing each other. They like to make atoms and collide and bounce off each other all the time. So if you want to build a switch or a microchip where lots of things connect to each other to do some big complicated task like computing lots of math then electrons work really well.

But if you try to get photons to dance together to do something complicated you'll have a hard time. They only interact with each other and the stuff around them when things are just right, and then only in limited ways.

And if you try to use electrons to move data over any kind of distance that's hard too. They're constantly stopping to chat with atoms they find along the way, turning the energy of your message into heat.

How's that?

ardel95• 2 years ago

In quantum mechanics, bosons are (often massless) force carrying particles like photons or gluons. Fermions are the massive matter particles, such as electrons or quarks.

So, while I’ve never heard this saying before, I assume it’s meaning is that massless particles like photons are best for carrying information around (rather than electrons we are using in circuits today), while the electrons are best for carrying state, like in a switch.

Note, that in networking we have already made that transition by using fiber optics, rather than electric wire to transfer information over longer distances.

amelius4• 2 years ago

Hmm, fermions are still better for __power__ transport.

jlokier• 2 years ago

When you measure the flow of electrical power along a cable, the energy travels close to the speed of light, yet the electrons drift very, very slowly in comparison.

Electrical power is transported as a fast-moving density wave in the electromagnetic force between many electrons and protons, the former drifting slowly.

Not by the electrons themselves, as if energy were attached to them.

The force responsible for transporting the energy so much faster than the electrons themselves move, is comprised of photons (bosons not fermions)...

amelius4• 2 years ago

HITOP performs about 1 trillion operations per second, whereas sophisticated Nvidia chips can chug through 300 times as much data

Wow, it sounds like optical computing is already closer than I expected.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m2• 2 years ago

If you have a laser, you can print an optical neural network using a consumer 3D printer. The present barrier to adoption, as the article describes, is the cost of transitioning from the optical space to the electronic space.

omneity• 2 years ago

Do you know where does this cost lie? Say for an organization with no prior spending on "legacy" electronics based hardware.

Is it the sunken cost in existing hardware, or developing the rest of the "value chain" to make photonics work, or something else altogether?

Rayhem• 2 years ago

If you have a laser, you can print an optical neural network using a consumer 3D printer.

I would love to look into this more. Do you have a reference that would give some instructions on how to give this a go?

nomercy400• 2 years ago

But the optical chip’s efficiency is compelling. “The game here is that we lowered the energy cost 1,000 times,” Chen said.

The second part of that paragraph is even more important. The optical equivalent is actually ~3x more efficient than the electronical version. With 300x HITOPs you would only consume 300 energy instead of the 1000 energy of the Nvidia version.

Simplified, that means 3x longer battery life, or 3x less heat, or 3x lower energy bill.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 2 years ago

3x longer battery life, or 3x less heat, or 3x lower energy bill.

Can we not have the same battery life, same heat, and same power bill and instead do 3 times as many things?

synergy20• 2 years ago

it's the photonics amplifiers that are very hard to make on wafer

stuckinhell• 2 years ago

Can't we just AI driven techniques to help optimize and reduce resource usage.

I think we are all ready seeing good results. I'm super interested in the next gen chips as well.

https://stability.ai/news/stability-ai-sdxl-turbo

https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/01/05/deepminds-latest-ai-...

kevincox• 2 years ago

Why not both? Just because we can make our code more efficient doesn't mean we should go back to Motorola 6800s. We should make our code more efficient and make hardware that can run that code more efficently.

noqc• 2 years ago

Regular I doesn't need that much power, maybe we could just use that instead?

ActionHank• 2 years ago

Ok, but how do you lie to VCs to trick them into thinking there is limitless potential in RI?

hackable_sand• 2 years ago

It sounds like VC boards are semi-civilised bands of fairy tale creatures that have to be put to sleep with gold and fantastical tales or else you get kicked out the kingdom and they kidnap your children.

j45• 2 years ago

Reminds me of lightera and infinera

tempodox2• 2 years ago

Apart from the fact that there is no such thing as AI (it's artificial all right but far from intelligence), this might be the next cryptocurrency, i.e. huge energy waste for no perceptible gain. Except this time there are way more suckers and a hype wave the likes of which we haven't seen since the web 1.0 bubble.

DeathArrow2• 2 years ago

I agree there's no intelligence, and that there's hype, but on the other hand there's some useful stuff being solved by Machine Learning.

DeathArrow2• 2 years ago

Quantum computing, carbon chips, biological chips, optical chips. I have heard about these supposed alternatives to classic silicon chips since at least 20 years ago. They always were 10 years from the point where they can show their super-powers.

I am not saying it can't be done, but I think we are either limited by the level of science we know or by money. We are probably still far from a major breakthrough in computing that will yield exponential growth.

And even when we will have the wonder chip, someone will port Javascript on it, so things can be slow again. :)

parl_match• 2 years ago

The benefits have to outweigh the cost. We're finally reaching the edge of silicon based technologies, where improvements are not guaranteed or incremental. There's still, obviously, a lot of possible improvement, but it's finally worth seriously looking at alternatives.

You'll likely start to see optical networking in cars first, fwiw.

az09mugen• 2 years ago

In the first place, why use AI for such basic tasks as generate commit messages ?

AI Needs Enormous Computing Power. Could Light-Based Chips Help?

Related Stories