
AI made from a sheet of glass can recognise numbers just by looking - signa11
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2208975-ai-made-from-a-sheet-of-glass-can-recognise-numbers-just-by-looking/
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rahimiali
They implement a trained dense multilayer neural net wit ReLU activations in
silicon photonics. They evaluate it on MNIST.

They use graphene to approximate the ReLUs. The device is a few microns on
each side.

The 2D image is first converted to a 1D wavefront by some external means, then
launched into the side of the device.

Training happens in digital computer, by simulating the behavior of the
device.

Full paper:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.07815.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.07815.pdf)

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mayank
I would _love_ a site with summaries like this of academic papers.

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dna_polymerase
I‘d _pay_ for a site that did this.

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rahimiali
my venmo user id is ali-rahimi-3

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stabbles
This is a really funny reply. Might not be a bad idea at all to make some
money explaining scientific articles on Hacker News.

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dmix
There's a ton of people doing it on Youtube. Not so much in short text form.

A daily 3-5 sentence (+ 1 picture?) email summary of an interest scientific
paper might be worth pursuing.

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daxfohl
Surprised nobody has called out the latency aspect: this is a ML solver that
can give you the answer in a single picosecond. It could resolve a thousand ML
queries before your CPU based solver had its first clock tick on the first
byte of the first pixel.

That could have some interesting applications for things that need it. Or
scale: a gazillion ML calculations per second. With zero power consumption.
From a piece of glass.

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H8crilA
Well it is a very simple solver, you can't change it after it's synthesized
and it's not true it uses no power - you need strong enough incoming light.
That's your power source. It's probably safe to assume that each layer removes
some power in a mutiplicative fashion, therefore it's only so much you can do
in a single glass step before the beam dissipates.

And as far as timing goes - 1 cm of glass delays by ~50 picoseconds. That
corresponds to around 20 gigahertz. Fast, but not mind blowingly fast.

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daxfohl
An OCR that could read 20B freehand characters per second using the power of
an LED is not mind blowing?

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H8crilA
Well it's MNIST - most basic and classic OCR benchmark out there. Also, no
info on how much light power is actually necessary, though I'm sure it's
exponential in the number of layers. And another thing I forgot to write is:
how are you going to interface with this thing?

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daxfohl
Nothing traditional. But who knows, there's probably a ceramics researcher
somewhere with some new comms or storage technology asking the converse.

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silveroriole
Blimey, this is really stretching the definition of AI, surely? It’s a piece
of glass that has been designed by a lot of trial and error to perform one
specific task. It sounds like humans were analysing the fitness and making the
modifications. I wouldn’t call it “unpowered AI” any more than I’d call a coin
sorter that.

~~~
atoav
Because it uses glas as a substrate and light as a information carrier?

Most of what we call “AI” today also uses prelearned weights for their neural
networks and in many use cases these weights are not touched after deployment.

I don’t see why a neural network encoded in glas should not be an AI while the
same neural network on a computer is one — either you have to call both AI or
neither.

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dkersten
Most of what we call AI can learn and update to an extent, in order to be able
to match a wider verity if I puts or to improve accuracy on existing inputs,
this is a hardcoded solution. If this counts as AI, then every bit of software
ever written also counts as AI, which makes the term even more meaningless and
marketing buzzwordy than it already is.

I suppose the question is, if an AI has learned and you export that final
learned state to use in a now-hardcoded classifier, is that classifier still
AI (or part of the overall AI) or is it simply the output? I can imagine
arguments on both sides. If you accept that as AI, then sure, this fits the
bill!

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dodobirdlord
> Most of what we call AI can learn and update to an extent

Most of what we call AI are hardcoded solutions once in production. There may
be ongoing offline improvements being made, but once the improvements are
established the production AI is replaced with a point-in-time snapshot of the
AI undergoing offline training. Self-learning in production causes all kinds
of problems, but most significantly it's a security issue since it gives an
attacker the ability to manipulate behavior by curating examples.

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hueving
The AI generates the solutions. The solutions are not AI.

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darpa_escapee
AI is gradient descent?

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voxl
It's comical how little people understand about machine learning, no one calls
an ODE solver artificial intelligence but gradient descent on an interesting
equation is somehow now A.I.

~~~
dkersten
Machine learning is just the lay-persons statistics, or something to that
effect.

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IshKebab
To be clear, it doesn't seem like New Scientist realised this, but they
haven't _actually made_ a glass block that does this. They've just simulated
one.

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jessriedel
Yea, the part of the article where they described the training procedure as if
they were re-arranging impurities in a physical piece of glass beggared
belief.

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TheOtherHobbes
They've simulated a physical system using digital hardware and software that
would operate like a read-only optical neural network analog if it existed in
a physical substrate.

I suppose the next stage is to develop another digital analog of a physical
system which can decide for readers if the original digital analog of a
physical system is "real AI".

Presumably with sufficient training it would be able to read and assess New
Scientist articles about its own development.

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MrQuincle
What would be the practical applications of something like this?

\+ Can you embed it in a mirror to portray information if a face is
recognized?

\+ Or can you make glass semitransparent when something is recognized?

\+ What about windows that blur anything that looks like a face? Preferably
keeping other objects the same. A bit of an autoencoder where only certain
objects are blurred.

\+ Can the amount of light shining on it lead to different results? Then you
can show a little movie by shining more and more light through the glass using
it in reverse.

It's a simple embodiment but I guess there are thousands of applications we
haven't thought of yet. Really cool train of thought!

~~~
jerkstate
Optical networking switch was my first thought.

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ebg13
This sounds like they've rediscovered the digital sundial and are running it
in reverse.

Light goes into face A of a digital sundial predominantly from a particular
angle and comes out face B patterned like a number. Presumably if you shined
light in the pattern of a number on face B, you'd get light coming out of face
A predominantly at a particular angle.

~~~
knolax
Except the if you ran a digital sundial in reverse it would only recognize one
particular image of a number. From TFA it seems to be able to recognize
multiple handwritten images.

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ebg13
> _Except the if you ran a digital sundial in reverse it would only recognize
> one particular image of a number._

Only because the sundials are purpose-built for producing clear digits. This
would produce blurry messes that, if you squint hard, would look a bit more
like one digit than like the others. But the principle doesn't appear to be
different.

This doesn't "recognize" anything. It's just a complex waveguide. You can see
it in their ray path diagrams.

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knolax
> This doesn't "recognize" anything. It's just a complex waveguide. You can
> see it in their ray path diagrams.

I don't see how your first and second statements are mutually exclusive.

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ebg13
Well, this plate doesn't choose which output is the correct one. Something
else has to look and decide which number-correspondent-band is the
maximal/correct one. But I don't want to argue that specific distinction. If
you want to call the waveguide a recognizer, I'm ok with you doing that.

The whole presentation of this article is very "woo". They say bullshit like
"the glass learned to bend the light". This is clearly stupid and false. The
system DESIGNING the glass learned how to construct the glass such that the
light bended appropriately. The glass hasn't learned shit.

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tempguy9999
Picking which of the 10 bands is the brightest has got to be trivial, so much
more so than directly recognising eg. '4', so it does seem to do what it says.

> The system DESIGNING the glass learned how to construct the glass such that
> the light bended appropriately

With a bit of rephrasing you could say exactly the same about a neural network
surely. The learning was embodied in the glass, so depending on definitions,
the glass was 'taught' something. It 'learnt' something.

I kind of see what you're saying, but it does seem to be discounting something
actually interesting and new (in my experience).

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bawana
I am bothered by this use of the word ‘intelligence ‘. To my mind,
intelligence is a comparative term, like height, weight, etc. if the universe
consisted of one individual, how could you say tall or short without some
reference to a norm or population. Further, the idea of multiple individuals
implies separate copies of a specific thing/person that can communicate . So
how can we talk about the intelligence of a piece of glass? Humans been
fascinated for a long time with animals and automatons that can mimic human
behaviors- is a poodle that walks more intelligent than a beagle that does
not? Is a mechanical Turk in a box intelligent? I wonder how long it will be
before someone discovers the artificial intelligence embodied in mechanical
clocks - they convert the stored energy of a spring into a sequence of numbers

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jointpdf
Here’s the original paper:
[https://www.osapublishing.org/DirectPDFAccess/3863EB7E-DF76-...](https://www.osapublishing.org/DirectPDFAccess/3863EB7E-DF76-25C4-A4F982F0B75C96CE_415059/prj-7-8-823.pdf?da=1&id=415059&seq=0)

~~~
jointpdf
If the link above doesn’t work, try this:
[https://www.osapublishing.org/prj/fulltext.cfm?uri=prj-7-8-8...](https://www.osapublishing.org/prj/fulltext.cfm?uri=prj-7-8-823&id=415059)

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stenl
Related Science paper from last summer ”All-Optical Machine Learning Using
Diffractive Deep Neural Networks”
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08711.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08711.pdf)
and
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6406/1004](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6406/1004)

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bakul
I wonder if one can create a similar auditory transfer function that is
attuned to a specific voice.... basically evolve a sound cavity of specific
shape

~~~
Zenst
You could have a large capture cavity initialy that has various rods of
materials that would sympathise with certain frequency ranges. Those rods run
into their own chamber's - seperating the frequencies.

Problem is with voice, it's the cadence, content and variations in the tones
that help discern an individual. For that you need to factor in a variable
amount of past data as you can't just take a snapshot - think taking a picture
of a single frame in a movie and knowing what the entire movie is about.

However, you could make something that needs a certain set of frequencies, so
with that something that could identify males or females by the sound of the
voice and the general rule of male voices being lower in frequency. That would
be a start. Though even that simple task, you start to see exceptions.

But if you can flowchart it and have ways to handle the logic, who knows what
is possible and impossible.

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daxfohl
Zero power "OK Google" trigger

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Zenst
Probably a cheat, but a piezo disc setup would give you zero power audio
capture and with others to power basic processing, you would be able to do
something, though may find yourself shouting during testing, though a capture
cone to focus the audio onto the piezo would help immensely. Though I'd
seriously have to sit down and work out what surface area of pezios and
vibration levels and as such power you could produce. Though could mitigate
that with some larger capacitors to capture all the passive sound and low
level power the piezo's will capture/produce during the day. Triggering
processor to check for your keyword and instigate an action.

Not analogue, but certainly would be Zero power.

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want2know
This is why what we now call AI isn't AI.

We now have the computing power to use a huge training set to set the
parameters of a function. But after that it is like this glass.

I really like this as example. It shows how a function reads numbers by
visualising the trained function.

But companies (Darpa for example) are already making the next step to AI:
creating a realtime feedback loop to update the trained function.

The outcome of that will be scary AI as far as I'm concerned.

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ppod
I wonder could you do something like this with liquid crystal to enable some
learning.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
This is essentially a kind of continuous 3D holography - unlike conventional
holography, which is a 2D transform that represents 3D light paths.

And that's _very_ interesting. This is the first application of what could be
a very very powerful new technology.

So far as I know addressable super-high resolution 2D holographic displays are
still a lab curiosity. There are some obvious technical problems with adding
depth, but as soon as you have a 3D addressable light matrix that can be
reconfigured dynamically, you have a whole new base for physical computing.

~~~
wumms
Would that be competition for IBM TrueNorth [0] (if made from some kind of
rewriteable material to be able to reprogram it)?

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNorth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNorth)

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techbio
It's a special kind of lens or prism, and "headline-grade buzzword choices"
notwithstanding, this is yet another _very interesting_ result out of the
University of Wisconsin - Madison.

As others have stated here, this construction is due to machine learning
whether or not the device itself has a capability to adapt further.

~~~
Zenst
Indeed, certainly not AI as we know it and "Analogue computer" or in this case
would be more apt, even "optical computer" would be more palatable than "AI".

Makes you wonder what kind of spin a "Hello World" program would glean from
some journalistic minds.

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mattkrause
"Talking computer greets humans…but who's in charge?"

~~~
Zenst
That so nails it I found myself clicking your profile and expecting some media
outlet reference [chuckle]. Which means I've either gone full cynic, or the
lines between parody and news have blurred so much that I'm seeing double.
Though I can still enjoy a chuckle and thank you for that.

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imvetri
This is huge.

Number system convertor using light and glass - core logic

Alphabets to ascii code convertor - Application 1 ASCII code to binary
convertor - Application 2

Imagine, if convertors are placed on top of one another.

Source of light need not be a problem as we can stack lenses to power it up.

Based on reading other's comments, I can see they are comparing it to an AI.

Its a problem solver using light and stacked glass. It uses structure from an
AI. Neural networks filters data. you can use a digital(electronic) device or
purely electrical

Input - Processing - Output - Conventional computation engine, it doesn't say
it should be electrical / mechanical. First computer was a mechanical device.

This uses light!

Here is another application.

How can a blind person tell whether it is day or night ? give a light bending
device that will focus light on the person's palm. If it heats up, its day.

Use a stacked light bending layers to get a yes/no answer.

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starpilot
I cut a circular hole in some paper. It's now an AI.

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shitgoose
if your goal is to detect round objects, then yes it is.

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TTPrograms
They must be restricted to linear models, right? So this is basically an
implementation of logistic regression? Doing nonlinear operations optically is
much trickier, and almost definitely active instead of passive.

EDIT: Actually they describe some nonlinear material inclusions in the paper,
interesting.

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daxfohl
You could cast thousands of these into space with lenses on them and they
would have just enough power to send a signal when they detect an
extraterrestrial planet or something.

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daxfohl
Power free, kinda. Still needs light though. Begs the question whether this
would be more efficient or a solar powered tpu with the same amount of light.

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shitgoose
it is very surprising how many people here resent the idea of an analog
solution. this is an irrational mental block - anything that is not digital
cannot be "intelligent". i wonder what is the reason - age, education? is this
what CS does to people? to me, for example, having a neural network in a piece
of glass is genius.

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kreetx
Not that this thing isn't cool, but if my house has a window then is this AI
too? I can now see through it and tell if there's a cat sitting on the lawn or
not.

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acollins1331
ASIC here ASIC there I got an ASIC for you!

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zenlibs
I might be wrong, but I believe the glass is the output of an AI program,
trained by observing multiple manually corrected iterations of glass making,
to arrange impurities while making glass, for object recognition. The glass
and impurities themselves aren't the AI here, the program that can repeatedly
be used in mass production to make object-recognizing glass, is the AI

~~~
woah
This looks like any of the “build your first neural net” tutorials online that
do the same task. The only difference is that training this one was a lot more
work.

