A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
lightmatter.co
A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#2I stopped reading after "Soon, you will not be able to afford your computer. Consumer GPUs are already prohibitively expensive."
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#3> Critically, this processor achieves accuracies approaching those of conventional 32-bit floating-point digital systems “out-of-the-box,” without relying on advanced methods such as fine-tuning or quantization-aware training.
Hmm... what? So it is not accurate?
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#4I stopped reading after "Soon, you will not be able to afford your computer. Consumer GPUs are already prohibitively expensive."
This is always a hilarious take. If you inflation adjust a 386 PC from the early 90s when 486's were on the market you'd find they range in excess of $3000 and the 486s are in the $5000 zone. Computers are incredibly cheap now. What isn't cheap is the bleeding edge. A place fewer and fewer people have to be at, which leads to lower demand and higher prices to compensate.
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#5This paradigm for computing was already covered three years ago by Veratasium in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg.
Maybe not the specific photonic system that they are describing. Which I'm sure has some significant improvements over what existed then. But the idea of using analog approximations of existing neural net AI models, to allow us to run AI models far more cheaply, with far less energy.
Whether or not this system is the one that wins out, I'm very sure that AI run on an analog system will have a very important role to play in the future. It will allow technologies like guiding autonomous robots with AI models running on hardware inside of the robot.
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#6> Critically, this processor achieves accuracies approaching those of conventional 32-bit floating-point digital systems “out-of-the-box,” without relying on advanced methods such as fine-tuning or quantization-aware training. Hmm... what? So it is not accurate?
It's an analog system. Which means that accuracy is naturally limited.
However a single analog math operation requires the same energy as a single bit flip in a digital computer. And it takes a lot of bit flips to do a single floating point operation. So a digital calculation can be approximated with far less energy and hardware. And neural nets don't need digital precision to produce useful results.
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#7I stopped reading after "Soon, you will not be able to afford your computer. Consumer GPUs are already prohibitively expensive."
It was kind or that way in early days of high end personal computing. I remember seeing an ad in the early 90s for a 486 laptop that was $6,000. Historically prices have always gone down. You just have to wait. SoTA is always going to go for a premium.
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#8> Critically, this processor achieves accuracies approaching those of conventional 32-bit floating-point digital systems “out-of-the-box,” without relying on advanced methods such as fine-tuning or quantization-aware training. Hmm... what? So it is not accurate?
It's an analog system. Which means that accuracy is naturally limited. However a single analog math operation requires the same energy as a single bit flip in a digital computer. And it takes a lot of bit flips to do a single floating point operation. So a digital calculation can be approximated with far less energy and hardware. And neural nets don't need digital precision to produce useful results.
> neural nets don't need digital precision to produce useful results.
The point - as shown by the original implementation...
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#9Weirdly complex to read yet light on key technical details. My TLDR (as an old clueless electronics engineer) was the compute part is photonic/analog, lasers and waveguides, yet we still require 50 billion transistors performing the (I guess non-compute) parts such as ADC, I/O, memory etc. The bottom line is 65 TOPS for I remember a TV Program in the UK from the 70's (tomorrows world I think) that talked about this so I am guessing silicon was just more cost effective until now. Still taking it at face value I would say it is quite an exciting technology.
Re: A New Kind of Computer (April 2025)
#10[deleted]