Luminous Computing

Luminous Computing is the Californian company which develops AI chips for data transmission using light.

Biographies

2019: Bill Gates and also the cofounder and the head of Uber invested in Luminous

At the beginning of June, 2019 the co-founder of Microsoftbill Gates, the co-founder of Ubertravis Kalanik and the CEO of Uber Dara Hosrovshakhi invested in Luminous. The amount of investments is not called.

The purpose of the Luminous company consisting of seven people consists in creation of the chip which is capable to replace 3000 payments containing the latest chips. Luminous is ready to sell the chips to different types of the companies: as to cloud providers, such, both to Google or Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the companies which make drones, unmanned vehicles or robots. Investors believe in success of the company – at the initial stage of Luminous attracted $9 million.

Gates invested in the developer of AI chips which use light for data transmission

The cofounder and the CEO of Luminous Marcus Gomez managed to work in due time both in Google, and in Tinder. In Tinder he among other things trained the AI models and came to a conclusion that such tasks should take away read minutes, but not days and hours. Gomez told that the Luminous company intends to use silicon photonics which provides fast data transmission using light just as fiber optic cables work. The approach used by Luminous relies on earlier work on neuronomorfny photonics which was written by the cofounder of the company Mitchell Nahmias, studying in Princeton University.

Several other startups, such as Lightmatter and Lightelligence, try to use silicon photonics for acceleration of work of AI. The idea consists in making the Luminous chip compatible to popular software platforms on the basis of AI open source, such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.

By the beginning of June, 2019 in Luminous do not say when chips of the company go on sale.^[1]

Notes