China’s optical chip breakthrough boosts AI speed 100-fold using fraction of compute power

Chinese researchers have developed a new all-optical interconnect system linking standard electronic chips, boosting AI distributed inference speeds by over 100 times while using just one-ninth of the typical computational resources. AI models are permeating ever more applications, expanding the industry’s appetite for computational power. The conventional response has been to pile on more GPUs and build ever-larger data centres in a seemingly endless race for energy and brute force. But a new...