Nvidia, with its Blackwell and Hopper chips, is widely viewed as the leading force in the chip-making sector that fuels the AI revolution.
While numerous entities are competing, the Chinese government’s ambitions extend beyond merely reducing its reliance on Nvidia chips; they seek to take the lead in this arena, a fact that is widely recognized.
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A recent report from the South China Morning Post stated that an optical computer chip created by Chinese researchers outperformed Nvidia’s top AI hardware in speed and energy efficiency, particularly in generative tasks such as image synthesis and video production.
The optical AI chips, named ‘LightGen’, are said by the scientists to be capable of producing high-resolution images, including 3D environments, as well as generating videos.
This chip was developed by a collaboration between Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tsinghua University.
These researchers, like others in the field, are focusing on photonic computing as traditional systems reach their operational limits while consuming excessive energy. This shift enables a greater emphasis on what the report termed ‘sustainable AI’, given that energy consumption has surged alongside the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence across various sectors.
Furthermore, the researchers noted the creation of a generative training algorithm that eliminates the need for extensive labeled datasets compared to conventional methods.
The SCMP report highlighted LightGen’s computing speed at 3.57×10⁴ Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) and an impressive energy efficiency of 6.64×10² TOPS/watt.
Note: The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based publication owned by Alibaba Group, is viewed by some commentators as being closely aligned with the perspectives of the Chinese Communist Party and the government of China, raising questions about its biases towards the Asian powerhouse in the past.
