Photonic Chip Performs Image Recognition at the Speed of Light

Deep neural networks that mimic the workings of the human brain now often power computer vision, speech recognition, and much more. However, they are increasingly limited by the hardware used to implement them. Now scientists have developed a deep neural network on a photonic microchip that can classify images in less than a nanosecond, roughly the same amount of time as a single tick of the kind of clocks found in state-of-the-art electronics.