Intro to the Current State of AI & AI Infrastructure – Hello AI

6 hours ago
2 min read

With the world’s increasing focus on automation and AI, photonics is often mentioned as crucial to making it all possible. But have you ever wondered what photons have to do in a world dominated by electrons? Photons, which are more commonly known as light, are used to transmit information!

A hand holding a glowing torch-like cable that emits numerous white and red fiber-optic cables. The cables fan out and curve upward, while a central beam of light illuminates a translucent floating bubble containing the letters "AI." Smaller bubbles float around the central one against a dark, moody background

As automation advances, the demand for information has never been greater. We now need data to move faster, in larger quantities, and with more efficiency than ever before. That is why photonics, the science of creating, controlling, and using light, is more relevant than ever.

The Scale of Modern AI

Platforms like [ChatGPT](https://chatgpt.com/), which processes 2.5 billion prompts daily per OpenAI (TechCrunch), handle each query across GPU clusters. [TechCrunch]

These systems learn through training (learning patterns from datasets) and inference (applying knowledge in real time). [Google Cloud] [IBM]

While AI training remains a foundation for its progress, much of today’s wave of innovation prioritizes optimizing inference, making real-time responses faster and more accessible for everyday applications.

Where Photonics Comes In - AI Infrastructure

Photonics is what allows this scale of AI to be possible. Electronic systems rely on the movement of electrons through wires, which generates heat and faces bandwidth limitations. Photonic systems, on the other hand, use light to move information at nearly the speed of, well, light.

This, in turn, means:

Higher bandwidth, enabling AI systems to move massive datasets quickly for machine training. [NVIDIA]
Lower energy consumption, since photons produce no resistive heat (unlike copper wiring). [Effect Photonics]
Greater scalability, as optical assemblies replace copper wiring in data centers. [Nature]

The Big Picture

As AI becomes more deeply integrated into daily life, the infrastructure supporting it (including but not limited to hardware, interconnects, and optical networks) becomes just as important as the algorithms themselves. There cannot be one without the other. The next wave of innovation won’t come from software alone but from the physical systems that enable AI to be more efficient while processing more and staying feasible.

The world’s smartest systems, it turns out, still depend on something as natural and fundamental as light.