[HN Gopher] MZI-based transistorlessness might finally be here
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       MZI-based transistorlessness might finally be here
        
       Author : aniijbod
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2026-04-14 19:37 UTC (3 days ago)
        
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       | irickt wrote:
       | An interesting and accessible article on the increased
       | plausibility of photonic compute.
        
       | refulgentis wrote:
       | I get the "AI uses < 32 bit weights sometimes" thing, intimately,
       | but I feel like I'm missing:
       | 
       | A) Why that means calculations can be imprecise - the weights are
       | data stored in RAM, is the idea we'd use > N-bit weights and say
       | it's effectively N-bit due to imprecision, so we're good? Because
       | that'd cancel out the advantage of using < N-bit weights. (which,
       | of course, is fine if B) has a strong answer)
       | 
       | B) A aside, why is photonics preferable?
        
       | refulgentis wrote:
       | "That's not a lab toy. That's a product-trajectory data point."
       | 
       | sigh. (why? because now I have to guess how much is vague
       | handwaving, or an AI trying to fit a square peg into a round
       | hole, and how much is reality)
        
       | LeroyRaz wrote:
       | This reads like something AI generated...
        
       | zitterbewegung wrote:
       | This is something I always thought if you could make an Optical
       | Computer using MZI or other technologies that don't have very
       | "exact" requirements on computation. Similar to how LLMs right
       | now where models are run on consumer devices like a Macbook Pro
       | where we quantize to 4 bit computations you could hypothetically
       | just run a larger model using MZI's doing inference on those
       | systems.
       | 
       | Since you are only changing the underlying model every so often
       | instead of doing a large training loop when you setup the optical
       | computer that can do inference it scales 2n+1 with clock speeds
       | of to 100THz with only 100w of power vs traditional GPUs at 2GHZ
       | with 1Kw for 15k cores.
        
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