2021, the year AI ate HPC … and more

Back in 2011, Marc Andreesen announced that Software was eating the world while everyone was trying to make sense of the realities of the cloud versus brick and mortar businesses. Eight years later, Tarry Singh articulated how AI was eating software; a year before GPT-3 and Codex would give solid ground to this prediction. Fast forward two years later,...

Dec 2021

LightOn Photonic coprocessor integrated into European AI Supercomputer

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog **This is history of computing in the making stuff!Four years ago to the day, LightOn’s first Optical Processing Unit (OPU) had its first light in a Data Center showing that our technology was data center ready.It is with immense pride and pleasure to announce that LightOn’s OPU has been installed in one...

Dec 2021

The Akronomicon: an Extreme-Scale Leaderboard

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog **As larger models seem to be providing more context and more ability for zero-shot learning, Julien just created the Akronomicon: an Extreme-Scale Leaderboard featuring the world's largest Machine Learning Models. And yes, LightOn is on that board for the moment! Want to contribute? https://github.com/lightonai/akronomicon  ...

May 2021

Virtual Workshop: Conceptual Understanding of Deep Learning (May 17th 9am-4pm PST)

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog **Just got an email from Rina PanigrahyHi Igor,I am an algorithms researcher at Google (http://theory.stanford.edu/~rinap) and I am organizing this workshop on "Conceptual Understanding of Deep Learning" (details below). It's trying to understand the Brain/Mind as an algorithm from a mathematical/theoretical...

Apr 2021

Randomized Algorithms for Scientific Computing (RASC)

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog **At LightOn, we build photonic hardware that performs random projections and it is nice to find a source of materials on the subject in one document. Here is a report comprehensively presenting how randomized algorithms are key to the future of computing:Randomized Algorithms for Scientific Computing (RASC) by Aydin...

Apr 2021

The $1,000 GPT-3

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog **Progress usually comes from a steady technology bootstrap…until it doesn’t.Take for instance the race for the $1,000 genome that started in the early 2000s. Initially, sequencing the human genome meant a race between the well-funded public and private sectors but more importantly, the resources for the...

Apr 2021

Computing with Light: How LightOn intends to unlock Transformative AI

I gave a talk at #mathia2021 conference on March 9th, 2021 where I drew a parallel between the scaling laws that enabled industrialization in the 1920's and the new scaling laws in AI of the 2020's. AI is at its infancy and it needs to have guiding principles (as embedded in these empirical laws) and it also needs to develop new hardware. I showed how,...

Mar 2021

Unveiling LightOn Appliance

Today is a big day at LightOn as we unveil a hardware product, the Appliance, the world's first commercially available photonic co-processor for AI and HPCIf interested pre-ordering information is here: http://lighton.ai/lighton-appliance We have had a few of these optical processing units in our own LightOn Cloud for the past two years and just retired...

Mar 2021

Video: LightOn unlocks Transformative AI

In the coming days, we'll be making another announcement but I wanted to first share a video we did recently. At LightOn, we don't build photonic computing hardware because it's fancy or cool (even though, it is cool) but because computing hardware is hitting the limits. I know what some say about Moore's law not being dead but the recent focus on Transformers...

Mar 2021

The Awesome Implicit Neural Representations Highly Technical Reference Page

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog ** Here is a new curated page on the topic of Implicit Neural Representations aptly called Awesome Implicit Neural Representations. It is curated by Vincent Sitzmann (@vincesitzmann) and has been added to the Highly Technical Reference Page:From the page:A curated list of resources on implicit neural representations,...

Dec 2020