It doesn’t take clairvoyance to know that artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to hold a pivotal focus for entities ranging from multinational enterprises to startups in 2024. Industries from healthcare to finance to consumer electronics and beyond seek to leverage the technology to expand their potential through both more cost-effective, efficient operations and industry-leading solutions.
And with that power comes potential—and potential problems.
For the latter, one needs to look no further than the boomerang CEO shakeup at OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, over the past few months. While Sam Altman has been reinstated as CEO after a shocking and very public firing, the company will need to continue working to soothe ruffled feathers to restore the confidence of its customers, shareholders, and partners.
As a key part of its resurgence, Microsoft’s role will be one to watch. Acting as OpenAI’s largest shareholder, Microsoft now occupies a nonvoting observer role on the Board—which is certain to be impactful. It’s not surprising given that Microsoft already has sunk billions into OpenAI’s operations, supporting what has been explosive growth: At the company’s first developer conference back in November, Altman reported ChatGPT boasted more than over 100 million weekly users and more than two million developers using their APIs.
But with any transformative technology, there are bound to be these types of corporate struggles. The question of market dominance drives fervor into frenzy, creating a sense of urgency to act, advance, and develop. The OpenAI leadership ping-pong won’t be the only shift we’ll see; AI technology leaders will be seeking ways to enhance and expand on early foundations, competing to launch the next best solution in the market.
And therein lies the photonics opportunity.
As an enabling technology, photonics sits at the precipice of possibility. While clearly AI has already been established, current solutions have just scratched the surface of its capabilities. Photonic technologies can offer much in the way of more efficient, optimizing solutions, and as industry-leading companies invest in research to fuel this new pocket of potential, photonic solutions will emerge to become a driving force behind AI.
For instance, silicon photonics plays a vital role in developments like the miniaturization of 3D sensors for a wide variety of applications. Consider how those advancements can be combined with frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR, which enables the use of eye-safe wavelengths, provides instantaneous velocity, and removes the need for high-power lasers to reach long distances. Combining these two techniques could help nearly every electronic machine, including drones, robots, and wearable devices, to become more realistically aware of its surroundings.
And the photonics community is already advancing this work. Take SiLC Technologies, Inc. (SiLC), an Optica Corporate Member and a leader in silicon photonics whose mission is to enable machines to see like humans, leveraging silicon photonics to support intelligent machine learning and AI. The company’s chief solution, the Eyeonic Vision System, has already combined FMCW LiDAR with silicon photonics and recently reported achieving a detection range beyond two kilometers. This advancement holds much promise for autonomous vehicles, drones, wearable devices, and more.
While impressive, this serves as a singular example of how photonics will facilitate the evolution of AI. As 2024 unfolds with its emphasis on AI technology, my attention is on the photonic integration elements fueling advancements. If we dig deeper into nearly any AI solution to determine what is powering its potential, chances are that photonics is in the fold. And that speaks volumes for the future of both technologies.