LightGen Photonic Chip Enables Large-Scale AI

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tsinghua University published a Science paper presenting LightGen, an all-optical processor that integrates over two million photonic neurons on a quarter-square-inch device. The chip uses an "optical latent space" with metasurfaces and fiber arrays to process full-resolution images and reportedly achieves more than 100× the speed of an Nvidia A100 in laboratory tests. LightGen performed high-resolution semantic image generation and 3D manipulation but currently requires external laser setups and specialized manufacturing.