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Comment by fudged71 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a new PR spin on the same technology that was posted a while ago. 3D printed optical neural networks. I'm surprised I haven't seen more interest considering the energy efficiency and speed of computation.

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The problem with them is that you don't get multiple layers of nonlinear operations: wave functions in simple media form a linear space after all.

I don't see any technical reason you couldn't implement a relu in optics. There is a whole area, nonlinear optics (I think you may have intended that when you you said 'simple media?' Well, let me see. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03787

From two years ago: https://opg.optica.org/ol/fulltext.cfm?uri=ol-45-17-4819&id=... but again, this isn't simple media.

Thanks, the papers you quoted seem to describe something with low losses (though i can't find explicit statements to that effect when skimming). I was under the impression that nonlinear optics will have huge losses, because it requires multiphoton interactions (which should usually have low cross sections), so will have to figure out which part of my intuition doesn't hold.

Because you brought it up in the context of "I'm surprised I haven't seen more interest in..." I do assume that it is something neat with an interesting application and cool engineering behind it.

However,

"3D printed optical neural network" sounds like a term someone came up with by selecting randomly from a bag of PR buzzwords and trying to come up with the most incoherent phrase possible, to the point where if I saw a headline about it I'd assume it was a scam or something.

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