Optical neural networks up to 1,000 times more power-efficient than state-of-the-art deep digital networks

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-energy-efficient-optical-neural-networks.html

"scattered light from low-power laser performing accurate, scalable, nonlinear computations using fraction of energy of electronics... no need for high-power laser, by encoding data such as pixels in spatial modulation on low-power laser beam surface, reflecting back on itself several times, leading to nonlinear multiplication of pixels... pixels multiplied by themselves (squared), each time encoded, achieving non-linearity essential to neural network calculations, at fraction of energy cost... optical neural networks."