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.
Hi! I’m a complete outsider to photonics; I recently visited a semiconductors / photonics conference and heard this talking point about photonics improving AI power efficiency:
AI needs a huge amount of power, especially in moving data to memory / across interconnects (which take ~80% of power in AI clusters). AI is bottlenecked by power, not chip manufacturing.
Moving electrons is energy intensive while moving photons takes much less energy (I’ve heard figures of 100x less).
Therefore photonics will be a crucial enabler of scaling in the future.
And the vibe I have (from talking with testing / manufacturing exhibitors at the conference) is that by 2035, photonics may improve deployed AI cluster-level power efficiency by:
1.5x or better (75% confidence)
2x or better (55% confidence)
3x or better (22% confidence).
I’m curious what you posted a year ago? Was it also about improving power efficiency?
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.
Hi! I’m a complete outsider to photonics; I recently visited a semiconductors / photonics conference and heard this talking point about photonics improving AI power efficiency:
And the vibe I have (from talking with testing / manufacturing exhibitors at the conference) is that by 2035, photonics may improve deployed AI cluster-level power efficiency by:
1.5x or better (75% confidence)
2x or better (55% confidence)
3x or better (22% confidence).
I’m curious what you posted a year ago? Was it also about improving power efficiency?
Post is still up here.
More recent thoughts here.