Project Polar- Energy efficient artificial intelligence using photonic processors

While the rise of artificial intelligence and big data are often presented as the answer to the challenge of big data, they also present a significant challenge to the environment. As the size and complexity of AI algoritms grows, the energy consumption and environmental cost related to training those algorithms and analysing data is growing at an alarming rate. For example, the average cost of training an AI algorithm is as much as 284 tonnes, five times the emissions of an average car, and the amount of computing time and energy needed has doubled every 3.4 months since 2012\.

ORCA computing are a brand new photonic computing company, spun out from the University of Oxford in November 2019\. In this project, ORCA will develop a prototype photonic integrated processor system that can enable significant speed up and efficiency savings over the AI accelerator products on the market today.