{"id":211546,"date":"2025-04-16T05:13:24","date_gmt":"2025-04-16T10:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/programmable-photonic-chip-uses-light-to-accelerate-ai-training-and-cut-energy-use"},"modified":"2025-04-16T05:13:24","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T10:13:24","slug":"programmable-photonic-chip-uses-light-to-accelerate-ai-training-and-cut-energy-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/programmable-photonic-chip-uses-light-to-accelerate-ai-training-and-cut-energy-use","title":{"rendered":"Programmable photonic chip uses light to accelerate AI training and cut energy use"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/programmable-photonic-chip-uses-light-to-accelerate-ai-training-and-cut-energy-use.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Penn Engineers have developed the first programmable chip that can train nonlinear neural networks using light\u2014a breakthrough that could dramatically speed up AI training, reduce energy use and even pave the way for fully light-powered computers.<\/p>\n<p>While today\u2019s AI chips are electronic and rely on electricity to perform calculations, the new chip is photonic, meaning it uses beams of light instead. Described in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41566-025-01660-x\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Nature Photonics<\/i><\/a>, the chip reshapes how light behaves to carry out the nonlinear mathematics at the heart of modern AI.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNonlinear functions are critical for training <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/deep+neural+networks\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">deep neural networks<\/a>,\u201d says Liang Feng, Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), and the paper\u2019s senior author. \u201cOur aim was to make this happen in photonics for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Penn Engineers have developed the first programmable chip that can train nonlinear neural networks using light\u2014a breakthrough that could dramatically speed up AI training, reduce energy use and even pave the way for fully light-powered computers. While today\u2019s AI chips are electronic and rely on electricity to perform calculations, the new chip is photonic, meaning [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}