The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will test Lumai’s light-based AI servers in a lab it helps fund, run by CommonAI in a commercial data center. The test will measure how the systems handle real AI models, power and cooling. Lumai’s power and efficiency claims have not been independently checked.

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will test servers that use beams of light to run artificial intelligence models, the Oxford startup Lumai said Tuesday.

How will ARIA test Lumai’s light-based AI servers?

The servers will go into a lab that ARIA helps fund. The Scaling Inference Lab, backed by £50 million from ARIA and run by the nonprofit CommonAI, will install Lumai’s Iris servers as its first optical computing platform. The lab will run them across several machines in a commercial data center. The goal is to see how the systems cope with real AI models, power and cooling.

How does Lumai’s light-based chip work?

Lumai, which was spun out of Oxford University in 2021, encodes data into beams of light. Its chips handle the heavy math behind AI using light instead of switching transistors. Normal electronics handle the rest of the work.

The company is aiming its hardware at what it calls prefill, the stage where a model first reads a user’s prompt. Ordinary chips would still produce the final answer.

David Lewis, ARIA’s chief science and technology officer, said the company’s work stands out. “Lumai’s technology is the most mature optical compute platform we evaluated,” Lewis said.

Have Lumai’s power efficiency claims been verified?

Lumai’s claims are large. The company says its approach could cut data center power use by up to 90 percent. It also says the system is at least 16 times more energy efficient per request than silicon alone when paired with standard chips. None of those figures has been independently checked. Testing them is the lab’s job.

Lumai is not the only company pursuing light-based computing in this space. The Scaling Inference Lab already hosts Oriole, another UK startup that uses light to link AI chips. Nvidia, meanwhile, has spent billions on light-based connections inside data centers. Salience Labs, which also builds on Oxford research, raised $125 million last month for optical switches.

Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
News Factory APP - noticias agénticas para impulsar tu SEO y AEO.