![]() In the first phase of silicon photonics, from 2000 to 2010, people wondered whether they could even do a design using the technology. Hochberg has also co-authored a book along with Lukas Chrostowski on silicon photonics design. So says Michael Hochberg (pictured), who has been behind four start-ups including Luxtera and Elenion whose products used the technology. Silicon photonics is now mature enough to be used to design complete systems. ![]() Luminous Computing is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer.Luminous Computing, a startup re-imagining how AI computers are built using silicon photonics, has raised $105M in a Series A round. The funding will primarily go towards doubling the size of the Luminous engineering team, building out its custom chips and software, and gearing up for commercial-scale production. While it is known from an algorithmic perspective how to deliver on the futuristic promises of AI, more compute, bandwidth and memory are still needed to achieve these goals. 'It’s an incredible time to be a part of the AI industry,' remarked Marcus Gomez, CEO and co-founder, Luminous. We can interact with computers in natural language and ask them to write a piece of code or even an essay, and the output will be better than most humans could provide. We just don’t have the hardware that can run those algorithms.' What’s frustrating is that we have the software to address monumental, revolutionary problems that humans can’t even begin to solve. Luminous is therefore looking to build supercomputers that satisfy these demands. The firm will use its proprietary silicon photonics technology to eliminate data movement bottlenecks at every scale, resulting not only in order-of-magnitude improvements in performance, but also in drastic simplifications to the programming model. Luminous isn't the only startup looking to commercialise silicon photonics chips for AI-based computing. ![]() Boston-based Lightmatter has also raised a combined $113M between its Series A and B funding round to achieve the same goal. Luminous Computing 6,952 followers on LinkedIn. '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 Gomez. ![]() Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Luminous Computing, which is making a light-based AI accelerator chip, raises a 105M Series A from Bill Gates and others at a 200M-300M post-money valuation Mastodon Open Links In New Tab. Were building the most powerful, scalable AI supercomputer on Earth. ‘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.’ We are a group of mission-driven pragmatists. Luminous is actively recruiting photonics designers, digital and analogue VLSI engineers, packaging and system integration engineers, and machine learning experts. The firm’s core differentiation comes from the fact that it is building nearly every part of the stack from the ground up, integrating expertise from a diversity of domains. 'If we can build the product AI customers have always dreamed of, but wasn’t possible, Luminous will dominate the future of computing.' 'At Gigafund, we focus only on founders that we believe have a path to building the most significant companies in the world,' said Luke Nosek, managing partner of Gigafund, one of the participants of the Series A round. Other Series A participants include Bill Gates, Gigafund, 8090 Partners, Neo, Third Kind Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Strawberry Creek Ventures, Horsley Bridge, Modern Venture Partners.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |