Large-Scale Optical Neural Networks

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Optical neural networks more energy efficient than the human brain?
https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.021032

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Also this YouTube video.
https://youtu.be/QD5D12mVJtw
However this guy is out of date about the flaw in current deep neural networks.
https://github.com/S6Regen/RP_AUTO_RESNET

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The main advantages of optical neural networks are very low power requirements and high speed. The disadvantage is they are bulky with low data density.
If you can get say 1 million network evaluations per second then evolution algorithms will work as fast as back-propagation without all the hardware complexity.
If you can evolve a relatively small but powerful controller neural network connected to a large scale semiconductor associative memory system that could perhaps do very well as an intelligent system.
There is also this company who have an optical processing unit:
https://www.lighton.ai/our-technology/
They also have this paper on Direct Feedback Alignment training of neural networks: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04554v1
Iā€™m not really a big fan of DFA training. I suspect it is using each layer in a relatively simplistic associative memory mode.