Artificial intelligence: From electronics to optics

Abstract

Machine Learning and big data are currently revolutionizing our way of life, in particular with the recent emergence of deep learning. Powered by CPU and GPU, they are currently hardware limited and extremely energy intensive. Photonics, either integrated or in free space, offers a very promising alternative for realizing optically machine learning tasks at high speed and low consumption. We here review the history and current state of the art of optical computing and optical machine learning.