Photonic Computing for Transformative AI

Photonic Computing for Transformative AI
lighton.ai

1. https://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com

Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I couldn’t find it on the site.

I am Igor Carron, the CEO of the company.

Our technology is different than the one used by Lightmatter and Lightelligence. We currently do not do integrated photonics.

We are starting from the ground up by first building a photonic co-processor that does one function (to be extended) of general interest to AI. the current function is a random projection. We believe that it will be complexified over time as we grow. But our particular focus is on those computations that are difficult to perform in electronics. In particular, our recent focus has been on Transformers/Large Language Models where we think our technology will be a game changer in the training and inference of these gigantic Machine learning models. For the training part, we published two papers at NeurIPS last year in the main conference. We also presented a more detailed one at one of the workshop: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.06373 We are going to present a poster at HotChips this year about our foray in HPC: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14429 Other papers in AI are listed at the LightOn AI research page: https://lair.lighton.ai/

Physically, speaking, the Optical Processing Unit fits into a 2U rack (currently our focus has not been to miniaturize yet, we avoid permature optimization) that is connected to a CPU bus through a PCIe connection.

The technology has been running for the past three years anf half in datacenters for the oldest prototypes (we just decommisioned one a month ago or so) with Machine Learning computation unit tests being performed every ten minutes during that time period.

We are making the technology available for researchers to use on our LightOn Cloud cluster (https://cloud.lighton.ai/what-is-lighton-cloud/) and people can even rent one or several OPUs (LightOn Appliance: https://lighton.ai/lighton-appliance/ ).

I agree, we need to redesign our website.

Igor.

How do you manage to start a company in France? I gave up.

It seemed to me that the environment is heavily against employers. A lot of taxes, regulations, especially those overly protecting employees, social charges, etc. Employers are held responsible for many aspects of employees’ lives.

Employers sometimes offer tenured jobs (CDI contracts), that in US can be found only in academia.

Interestingly, France’s economy remains significant.