The CEO of Lightmatter says their chip only does a matrix vector multiply, which he says is a core operation in deep learning. He also says photonics is not good for normal logic operations.
But that’s fine, because I am mostly concerned with accelerating deep learning. I’m a robotics engineer and when I look at large neural networks like GPT-3 I get the sense that robotics could work well with very massive networks, even orders of magnitude larger than GPT-3 (imagine not just ingesting text and producing a stream of words, but encoding a multidimensional world state for a robot and producing a desired action based on all current and past signals).
But to put massive neural networks orders of magnitude larger than GPT-3 in to a robot requires a significant step change in the efficiency and scale of neural network compute.
So I don’t mind if their chip doesn’t do standard logic well because a regular intel chip is great at that. I just want to see significantly more powerful neural network compute. And if the Lightmatter CEO is to be believed (I don’t know), their tech could be a boon for machine learning and robotics some day.
But that’s fine, because I am mostly concerned with accelerating deep learning. I’m a robotics engineer and when I look at large neural networks like GPT-3 I get the sense that robotics could work well with very massive networks, even orders of magnitude larger than GPT-3 (imagine not just ingesting text and producing a stream of words, but encoding a multidimensional world state for a robot and producing a desired action based on all current and past signals).
But to put massive neural networks orders of magnitude larger than GPT-3 in to a robot requires a significant step change in the efficiency and scale of neural network compute.
So I don’t mind if their chip doesn’t do standard logic well because a regular intel chip is great at that. I just want to see significantly more powerful neural network compute. And if the Lightmatter CEO is to be believed (I don’t know), their tech could be a boon for machine learning and robotics some day.