New ‘game-changing’ discovery for light-driven artificial intelligence

Low coherence light sources, such as the sun and light bulbs, emit light in a wide range of colour (or wavelengths). On the other hand, high quality engineered light sources (such as lasers) have a very narrow wavelength range and typically appear as a single colour. This partially coherent light was evenly split and distributed into different input channels for a parallel AI computational array. Diagram to show how once partially coherent light source can supply a whole photonic computing chip. Normally, such a speed - equivalent to playing more than 2 hours of 4K video in one second - could only be achieved in a coherent photonic AI accelerator with multiple separate coherent lasers.