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...

2w

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,...

4w

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

Hardware Beyond Backpropagation: a Photonic Co-Processor for Direct Feedback Alignment

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog ** We presented this work at the Beyond Backpropagation workshop at NeurIPS. A great conjunction between computational hardware and algorithm! Hardware Beyond Backpropagation: a Photonic Co-Processor for Direct Feedback Alignment by Julien Launay, Iacopo Poli, Kilian Müller, Gustave Pariente, Igor Carron,...

Dec 2020

Diffraction-unlimited imaging based on conventional optical devices

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog ** Aurélien sent me an email back in October and we are now in December! Time flies.Dear Igor,I hope things are well.I have been following your NuitBlanche blog for quite a few years. It would thus be great for us if you consider a recent paper of ours to appear in your blog, entitled “Diffraction-unlimited...

Dec 2020

LightOn at #NeurIPS2020

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog ** I posted the following on LightOn's Blog.We live in interesting times!A combination of post-Moore’s law era and the advent of very large ML models require all of us to think up new approaches to computing hardware and AI algorithms at the same time. LightOn is one of the few (20) companies in the world...

Dec 2020

Weight Agnostic Neural Networks, a virtual presentation by Adam Gaier, Thursday October 15th, LightOn AI meetup #7

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog ** Ever since we started LightOn, we have been putting some emphasis on having great minds think how new algorithms are possible and how they can be enabled with our photonic chips.  We also have a regular meetup where we see how other great minds are devising new algorithms. Tomorrow, Thursday (October 15th)...

Oct 2020

As The World Turns: Implementations now on ArXiv thanks to Paper with Code

** Nuit Blanche is now on Twitter: @NuitBlog ** It's the little things. In the 2000s, after featuring good work on Nuit Blanche, I was usually following through by asking authors where their codes were. This is how the implementation tag was born. Some of the answers were along the lines of: "I didn't make it available because I thought it was not worthy"....

Oct 2020