Okay, so hear me out: what if the key to faster AI processing wasn’t a massive server farm, but a clever hack using parts from, well, your old smartphone? That’s exactly what a team of researchers has been cooking up, and it’s seriously cool.
They’ve built an analog optical computer, and the wild part is how they’ve managed to assemble it. Instead of going the traditional route with super-specialized, expensive components, they’ve tapped into the readily available tech found in smartphones. Think about it – these devices are already packed with sophisticated optical components and processing power, just optimized for a different kind of task.
So, what exactly does this analog optical computer do? It’s designed to tackle some of the most demanding tasks in AI: inference and combinatorial optimization. Let’s break that down a bit.
AI Inference: This is basically how AI models make predictions or decisions based on new data. Think of it as the AI