They’ve been working on photonics compute for a long time so I’m curious if people have any knowledge on the timelines they expect it to have practical effects on compute.
Also, Sam Altman and Scott Gray at OpenAI are both investors in Fathom. Not sure when they invested.
I’m guessing it’s still a long-term bet at this point.
OpenAI also hired someone who worked at PsiQuantum recently. My guess is that they are hedging their bets on the compute end and generally looking for opportunities on that side of things. Here’s his bio:
Ben Bartlett
I’m currently a quantum computer architect at PsiQuantum working to design a scalable and fault-tolerant photonic quantum computer. I have a PhD in applied physics from Stanford University, where I worked on programmable photonics for quantum information processing and ultra high-speed machine learning. Most of my research sits at the intersection of nanophotonics, quantum physics, and machine learning, and basically consists of me designing little race tracks for photons that trick them into doing useful computations.
I’m working on publishing a post on this and energy bottlenecks. If anyone is interested in doing a quick skim for feedback, I hope to publish it in under two hours.
I took this post down, given that some people have been downvoting it heavily.
Writing my thoughts here as a retrospective:
I think one reason it got downvoted is that I used Claude as part of the writing process and it was too disjointed/obvious (because I wanted to rush the post out), but I didn’t think it was that bad and I did try to point out that it was speculative in the parts that mattered. One comment specifically pointed out that it felt like a lot was written by an LLM, but I didn’t think I relied on Claude that much and I rewrote the parts that included LLM writing. I also don’t feel as strongly about using this as a reason to dislike a piece of writing, though I understand the current issue of LLM slop.
However, I wonder if some people downvoted it because they see it as infohazardous. My goal was to try to determine if photonic computing would become a big factor at some point (which might be relevant from a forecasting and governance perspective) and put out something quick for discussion rather than spending much longer researching and re-writing. I agreed with what I shared. But I may need to adjust my expectations as to what people prefer as things worth sharing on LessWrong.
Anybody know how Fathom Radiant (https://fathomradiant.co/) is doing?
They’ve been working on photonics compute for a long time so I’m curious if people have any knowledge on the timelines they expect it to have practical effects on compute.
Also, Sam Altman and Scott Gray at OpenAI are both investors in Fathom. Not sure when they invested.
I’m guessing it’s still a long-term bet at this point.
OpenAI also hired someone who worked at PsiQuantum recently. My guess is that they are hedging their bets on the compute end and generally looking for opportunities on that side of things. Here’s his bio:
Ben Bartlett I’m currently a quantum computer architect at PsiQuantum working to design a scalable and fault-tolerant photonic quantum computer. I have a PhD in applied physics from Stanford University, where I worked on programmable photonics for quantum information processing and ultra high-speed machine learning. Most of my research sits at the intersection of nanophotonics, quantum physics, and machine learning, and basically consists of me designing little race tracks for photons that trick them into doing useful computations.
I’m working on publishing a post on this and energy bottlenecks. If anyone is interested in doing a quick skim for feedback, I hope to publish it in under two hours.
I took this post down, given that some people have been downvoting it heavily.
Writing my thoughts here as a retrospective:
I think one reason it got downvoted is that I used Claude as part of the writing process and it was too disjointed/obvious (because I wanted to rush the post out), but I didn’t think it was that bad and I did try to point out that it was speculative in the parts that mattered. One comment specifically pointed out that it felt like a lot was written by an LLM, but I didn’t think I relied on Claude that much and I rewrote the parts that included LLM writing. I also don’t feel as strongly about using this as a reason to dislike a piece of writing, though I understand the current issue of LLM slop.
However, I wonder if some people downvoted it because they see it as infohazardous. My goal was to try to determine if photonic computing would become a big factor at some point (which might be relevant from a forecasting and governance perspective) and put out something quick for discussion rather than spending much longer researching and re-writing. I agreed with what I shared. But I may need to adjust my expectations as to what people prefer as things worth sharing on LessWrong.