{"id":130629,"date":"2025-09-09T16:35:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T16:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/130629\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T16:35:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T16:35:22","slug":"microsofts-new-light-based-computer-is-inspired-by-80-year-old-technology-it-could-make-ai-100-times-more-efficient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/130629\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft’s new light-based computer is inspired by 80-year-old technology \u2014 it could make AI 100 times more efficient"},"content":{"rendered":"

A computer that uses light rather than digital switches for calculations could help reduce the energy demands of artificial intelligence<\/a> (AI), according to a new study. The scientists who invented the computer describe it as a new computing paradigm.<\/p>\n

Microsoft researchers developed a prototype analog optical computer (AOC) that can perform some tasks that an AI might be used for, as well as optimization problems.<\/p>\n

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The new computing system could one day solve certain problems faster and with less energy than modern digital computers are capable of, the scientists wrote in the study, published Sept. 3 in the journal Nature<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“The most important aspect the AOC delivers is that we estimate around a hundred times improvement in energy efficiency,” study co-author Jannes Gladrow<\/a>, an AI researcher at Microsoft, said in a Microsoft blog post<\/a>. “That alone is unheard of in hardware.”<\/p>\n

In the new study, Microsoft researchers built a computer that uses micro-LEDs and camera sensors to perform calculations.<\/p>\n

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Unlike regular digital computers, which flip billions of tiny switches to perform calculations, the new system uses light and voltage of different intensities to add and multiply numbers in a feedback loop. The AOC computes a problem many times, each time improving on the last, until it reaches a “steady state,” or final solution.<\/p>\n

Related: ‘Quantum AI’ algorithms already outpace the fastest supercomputers, study says<\/a><\/p>\n

Get the world\u2019s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n

Because the AOC doesn’t convert the analog signals to digital ones during the calculations, the AOC saves energy and overcomes some of the speed limitations inherent in digital computing.<\/p>\n

This specialized computation method “makes it a special-purpose “steady-state finder” for certain AI and optimization problems, not a general-purpose computer,” Aydogan Ozcan<\/a>, an optical computing researcher at UCLA who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.<\/p>\n

But for those specific purposes, the AOC could offer significant improvements over digital computing, the researchers wrote in the study.<\/p>\n

A new, light-based computing paradigm<\/p>\n

The team also programmed a “digital twin” \u2014 a computer model that mimics the physical AOC’s computations. This digital twin can be scaled up to handle more variables and more complex calculations.<\/p>\n

“The digital twin is where we can work on larger problems than the instrument itself can tackle right now,” Michael Hansen<\/a>, senior director of biomedical signal processing at Microsoft Health Futures, said in the blog post.<\/p>\n

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\"Woman\n<\/p>\n

(Image credit: Chris Welsch for Microsoft.)<\/p>\n

The team first had the AOC run some simple machine learning tasks, such as classifying images. The physical AOC performed about as well as a digital computer. A future, larger AOC that can handle more variables could quickly outclass a digital computer in energy efficiency, the team wrote.<\/p>\n

Then, the researchers used the AOC digital twin to reconstruct a 320-by-320-pixel brain scan image using just 62.5% of the original data. The digital twin accurately reproduced the scan \u2014 a feat the scientists say could lead to shorter MRI times.<\/p>\n

Finally, the team used the AOC to solve a series of financial problems that involved finding the most efficient way to exchange funds between multiple groups while minimizing risk \u2014 a challenge that clearinghouses face daily \u2014 with a higher success rate than existing quantum computers.<\/p>\n

For now, the AOC is a prototype. But as future models add more micro-LEDs, the machines could become much more powerful, computing with millions or billions of variables at a time.<\/p>\n

“Our goal, our long-term vision is this being a significant part of the future of computing,” Hitesh Ballani<\/a>, a researcher in Microsoft’s Cloud Systems Futures team, said in the blog post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A computer that uses light rather than digital switches for calculations could help reduce the energy demands of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[64,63,257,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-130629","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}