MIT spinout develops components powered by light that are low energy and fast. Lightelligence's optical chips offer orders of magnitude improvement in terms of high speed, low latency, and low power consumption. With most forecasters projecting an end to Moore's Law sometime in 2025, the company believes its solution is poised to address many of the computational challenges of the future.

Lightelligence aims to accelerate certain linear algebra operations to perform quick, power-efficient tasks like those found in artificial neural networks. Lightelligence boasts an all-MIT founding team, supported by 100 technical experts, including machine learning pioneers, leading photonic researchers, and semiconductor industry veterans.

The company's co-founder says its optical chips would greatly reduce the cost of data centers for AI applications. "Our chip completes these decision-making tasks at a fraction of the time of regular chips, which would enable the AI system within the car" By 2021, Lightelligence will have de-risked 80-90 percent of the technical challenges necessary for optical computing to be a viable commercial product, says Shen.

Lightelligence is making the most of its status as the newest member of the MIT Startup Exchange accelerator, STEX25, building deep relationships with tier-one customers on niche applications.

This article was summarized using an experimental AI. Feel free to let me know what you think below! The original article can be found on MIT News