Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have discovered that channeling ions into defined pathways in perovskite materials improves the stability and operational performance of perovskite solar cells. The finding paves the way for a new generation of lighter, more flexible, and more efficient solar cell technologies suitable for practical use.

Perovskite materials, which are defined by their crystalline structure, are better at absorbing light than silicon is. That means that perovskite solar cells can be thinner and lighter than silicon solar cells without sacrificing the cell’s ability to convert light into electricity.

“That opens the door to a host of new technologies, such as flexible, lightweight solar cells, or layered solar cells (known as tandems) that can be far more efficient than the solar harvesting technology used today in so-called solar farms,” says Aram Amassian, corresponding author of a paper on the discovery. “There’s interest in integrating perovskite materials into silicon solar cell technologies, which would improve their efficiency from 25% to 40% while also making use of existing infrastructure.” Amassian is a professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University.

The future of artificial intelligence is the question on all of our minds right now. AI has the potential of replacing us in every conceivable industry, leading to a potential dystopia. Humanity is suddenly gripped with this massive anxiety, but this is also our greatest opportunity.

Will this be the end of meaning?

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An illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope as it orbits the sun in our solar system, 1 million miles from Earth. Credit: ASA GSFC / CIL / Adriana Manrique Gutierrez Scientists expected the James Webb Space Telescope to reveal unknowns in the deepest realms of space.

At the 2023 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco this week, Irvine, Calif.–based Syntiant detailed the NDP200. This is an ultralow-power chip designed to run neural networks that monitor video and wake other systems when it spots something important. That may be its core purpose, but the NDP200 can also mow down the spawn of hell, if properly trained.

Apollo’s successful computing software was optimized to deal with unknown problems and to interrupt one task to take on a more important one.

The exponentially expanding scale of deep learning models is a major force in advancing the state-of-the-art and a source of growing worry over the energy consumption, speed, and, therefore, feasibility of massive-scale deep learning. Recently, researchers from Cornell talked about Transformer topologies, particularly how they are dramatically better when scaled up to billions or even trillions of parameters, leading to an exponential rise in the utilization of deep learning computing. These large-scale Transformers are a popular but expensive solution for many tasks because digital hardware’s energy efficiency has not kept up with the rising FLOP requirements of cutting-edge deep learning models. They also perform increasingly impressively in other domains, such as computer vision, graphs, and multi-modal settings.

Also, they exhibit transfer learning skills, which enable them to quickly generalize to certain activities, sometimes in a zero-shot environment with no additional training required. The cost of these models and their general machine-learning capabilities are major driving forces behind the creation of hardware accelerators for effective and quick inference. Deep learning hardware has previously been extensively developed in digital electronics, including GPUs, mobile accelerator chips, FPGAs, and large-scale AI-dedicated accelerator systems. Optical neural networks have been suggested as solutions that provide better efficiency and latency than neural-network implementations on digital computers, among other ways. At the same time, there is also significant interest in analog computing.

Even though these analog systems are susceptible to noise and error, neural network operations can frequently be carried out optically for a much lower cost, with the main cost typically being the electrical overhead associated with loading the weights and data amortized in large linear operations. The acceleration of huge-scale models like Transformers is thus particularly promising. Theoretically, the scaling is asymptotically more efficient regarding energy per MAC than digital systems. Here, they demonstrate how Transformers use this scaling more and more. They sampled operations from a real Transformer for language modeling to run on a real spatial light modulator-based experimental system. They then used the results to create a calibrated simulation of a full Transformer running optically. This was done to show that Transformers may run on these systems despite their noise and error characteristics.

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