BreadAndCircuses: Celestial is adding a brand new accelerator of its own (optical i/o) to the list of accelerators that are currently in use for AI processing: Multi-core CPUs, GPUs, TPUs.

One might wonder whether Celestial’s AI accelerator is using POET's technology for more than just a highly-sophisticated light source on steroids.

From the patent text:

Thus, in some embodiments, each circuit package includes an electronic integrated circuit (EIC) comprising multiple circuit blocks (hereinafter “processing elements”) that are connected by bidirectional photonic channels (e.g., implemented in a PIC in a separate layer or a chip of the package) into a hybrid, electronic-photonic (or a electro-photonic) network-on-chip (NoC). Multiple such NoCs may be connected, by inter-chip bidirectional photonic channels between respective circuit packages (e.g., implemented by optical fiber), into a larger electro-photonic network, to scale the computing system to arbitrary size without incurring significant power losses.