Yes. It’s using light instead of electricity.

Which has advantages in multiple aspects.

Pretty much every major technical college’s research/VC groups are making a photonics AI play right now.

One of the physicists at NIST suggested a few years ago that AGI would only occur in photonic neural networks because of the ability to better model the neuron in light vs electricity.

ML in particular is a great fit for the quantum effects of light too, given that in-process accuracy doesn’t matter, some degree of jitter is typically desired, and the network is a black box anyways so not being able to observe intermediate processing wouldn’t be a problem.

This work isn’t really playing with those effects yet (would need entirely new ways of training models), but it’s the fourth the road promise that’s probably the most exciting IMO.