“By introducing silicon photonics technology at the heart of computer architecture, we’re not only able to drastically improve performance and scalability, but we’re also able to make it much easier to build huge AI models.”Īccording to VentureBeat, Luminous has already produced multiple working prototypes of its silicon photonics chip. “Most people who build hardware assume that in order to improve performance, you have to trade off against programmability and cost-efficiency, or just go to a higher-density silicon node,” said Luminous co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Marcus Gomez. Luminous says its technology will make it easier to provide the growing amount of compute capacity necessary for AI development. That creates challenges because the complexity of AI models is growing rapidly: OpenAI estimates that the amount of compute capacity required for the largest AI training runs doubled every three and a half months between 2012 to 2018. The more complex a neural network, the more hardware is required to train it. The plan, according to the startup, is to harness the performance of silicon photonics to speed up AI training. Luminous intends to use its silicon photonics technology to build a supercomputer specifically optimized for AI workloads. The search giant offers the chips through its public cloud and also uses them to run internal applications. TPUs are specialized chips created by Google LLC for running AI models. Luminous told VentureBeat that it’s aiming to build a silicon photonics chip with 3,000 times the performance of a third-generation Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, circuit board. However, the startup did divulge its development goals on occasion of today’s funding announcement. Luminous has shared few technical details about its technology thus far. That’s the vision Luminous is working to implement. The vision behind silicon photonics is to leverage the fact that light travels faster in order to perform calculations more quickly than is possible with a traditional processor in which data is encoded as electricity. In certain circumstances, light can travel significantly faster than electricity. Silicon photonics technology takes a different approach: The technology encodes data not in the form of electricity, but rather as light. The processor manipulates this electricity, for example by moving it between transistors, to carry out calculations. The supercomputer is based on silicon photonics, a technology that holds the potential to significantly speed up certain computational tasks.Ī traditional processor keeps the data that it processes in the form of electricity. Mountain View, California-based Luminous is developing a supercomputer for running AI models. The participants included Gigafund, Bill Gates, 8090 Partners, Neo, Third Kind Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Strawberry Creek Ventures, Horsley Bridge, Modern Venture Partners and others. The Series A round included the participation of more than a half-dozen investors. Startup Luminous Computing Inc., which is developing a new kind of supercomputer for running artificial intelligence models, today said that it has closed a $105 million funding round.
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