California-based AI company, Luminous Computing, has raised $105 million from investors including Gigafund, ex-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, 8090 Partners, Neo, Third Kind Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Strawberry Creek Ventures, Horsley Bridge, Modern Venture Partners, and many more.
Luminous aims to revolutionize usable and secure artificial intelligence to help deliver sustainable performance.
There is no doubt that AI still has a long way to go before it can be applied for daily usage. Developers and scientists can easily provide algorithmic solutions to such problems. However, the application of such algorithms still requires large amounts of computational power, bandwidth, and memory. Keeping in mind these constraints, Luminous is building a supercomputer that can handle AI problems and applications of the future.
Luminous CEO and co-founder, Marcus Gomez, commented:
It’s an incredible time to be a part of the AI industry. AI has become superhuman. We can interact with computers in natural language and ask them to write a piece of code or even an essay, and the output will be better than most humans could provide. What’s frustrating is that we have the software to address monumental, revolutionary problems that humans can’t even begin to solve. We just don’t have the hardware that can run those algorithms.
Managing Partner at Gigafund, Luke Nosek, on the investment stated:
At Gigafund, we focus only on founders that we believe have a path to building the most significant companies in the world. If we can build the product AI customers have always dreamed of, but wasn’t possible, Luminous will dominate the future of computing.
Luminous is building the supercomputer from scratch and has taken on board various experts from different fields including photonics designers, system integration engineers, machine learning experts, and many more.
Gomez continued:
Most people who build hardware assume that to improve performance, you have to trade off against programmability and cost-efficiency, or just go to a higher-density silicon node. By introducing silicon photonics technology at the heart of computer architecture, we’re not only able to drastically improve performance and scalability, but we’re also able to make it much easier to build huge AI models.