Moore's Law is Dead — Welcome to Light Speed Computers

Moore's law is dead — we've hit the electron ceiling. It's time to compute with photons: light. This episode of S³ takes you inside Lightmatter — the company leading the photonic revolution.

0:00 A new age of compute
1:38 From fiber optics to photonics
2:58 Dennard scaling is done?
4:55 Founding Lightmatter
7:00 Lightmatter's chips
10:24 Why this is amazing
11:23 AGI scaling
15:45 Lightmatter's lab!

[sbuild]

It's really cool to see one of our episodes (especially one on such an underrated topic, Photonics!) perform so well out of the gate! One thing I (Jason) want to set the record straight on: We were not paid to make this video and additionally I, nor anyone on my team, have shares in Lightmatter. I'm seeing a lot of comments from people saying this is an "ad" or a "paid video, " which deeply annoys me because we have worked incredibly hard for 2 years (and said no to A LOT of sponsorships and companies who have wanted to pay us) to make S3 an independent, non pay-to-play / pay-for-coverage channel. This is unlike many other tech adjacent YouTube channels/news outlets in the space... You cannot pay to be on S3.

I understand my tone and rhetoric of general optimism and excitement in our videos can come off as overly excited and maybe even biased, but that's just how I communicate. I'm sick of seeing so much negativity around discussions involving advanced technology; the reason I am making these videos is to try and change the vibe around innovation. We make these videos because we believe that stories and conversations about technology should happen more broadly and that building the future is a really good thing to do!

Anyways, I'm always happen to answer specific questions about how or why we do what we do! I'm also VERY aware of things to improve on. Right now I'm mostly focused on: (a) more sources in videos, (b) in 2025 we are moving almost completely away from 1-company focused videos, (c) better editing, (d) trying to present a more balanced/educated view of any given topic we cover. I'm always open to feedback too!

Thanks for watching our stuff for the past few years and watching this episode! I hope you learned something new about photonics :)

(Also side note: It's unfortunate to see so many highly upvoted comments from people who didn't watch the entirety of our video. Sometimes, oftentimes, YouTube is painful lol).

[AuroraLex]

"The number of people predicting the death of Moore's law doubles every two years."
-Peter Lee, Microsoft

[ROVideos]

Before you ask me if I watched the whole video. I did, this is NOT computing, it's just faster BUS speed.
Which is great, but misleading.

[delicious_seabass]

The more I watched, the more I grew frustrated how things were being misrepresented. Then I scrolled down to the comments and breathed a sigh of relief.

[CommonTater]

moore's law has died like 900 times by now

[RandomUserOnTheInterWebs]

The premise of this company changed halfway through the video from "Computing with light" to "transferring data with light".

[WizThis]

At first you think they've created a transistor replacement, then you realise it's just the interconnect.

[timokreuzer]

Fiber is not "faster" than electric signals, it is in fact slower: electrical signals travel at 99% of the speed of light in vacuum, fiber signals travel at 70% the speed of light in vacuum. It's just that light allows to transport more data at once. That is why some datacenters use radio instead of fiber for low bandwith, low latency connections.

[ChrisJames-tfyw]

This is a hype video. It doesn't get into the technical details of the chip. Adding references to AGI lead me to question the validity of the claims.

[SpokoR]

Don't let this distract you from the fact that a machine with computational power less than a calculator landed humans on moon while we're doomscrolling our life away on the most advanced piece of tech available to us today. With AGI and stuff, we can create and consume memes and waste everyone's time at light speed.

[alq.h]

I work in a steel manufacturing industry and we're improving our method of steel production to create better racks for the GPUs and thereby enabling AGI progress.

[thegrhatty]

After seeing countless comments stating that this is "photonic transfer", not "photonic computation", and seeing the replies to them saying that obviously they didnt watch the whole video, i can confidently say that this is absolutely not photonic computation.
When the process of assembling an Envise chip is being explained, it's specifically stated that these chips merge existing electronic tech with this new photonic tech: there are transistor dies within these chips, a substrate for the dies is added, and then photonic chips are added to the assembly, followed by a substrate for the photonic and electronic components to communicate. I'm no expert, but it sure seems like we can't accurately call this "photonic computation" if electrons are still doing most of the heavy lifting.
I will say, though, that if photons can be used to actually perform computation, as opposed to the aforementioned transistor dies using electrons, the sky would be the limit.

[WeeHee]

I've said it once and I'll say it again. Now we can literally say that RGB improves performance.

[MyrKnof]

2:10 Just a correction here. Light in optical fibers is NOT faster than electrical.

[ballad]

While I enjoy the content, you definitely have to include a second viewpoint where you ask what the CURRENT problems with photonics is

[nanielwolf]

"We made marginally better wires for connecting dice" being hyped for 20 minutes is crazy

[asdf-tn]

I would never call it photonic computing, from what i understand it is just adding light for communication from chip to chip or chip to memory. It is not computing, it is only transporting data so what is the point of talking about Moore's law or size of tranzistor if computation is still being done on classic chips.

[TheTechAdmin]

Tell me 7 different ways that you're connecting the silicon substrate, to light; but take 20 minutes to do it.

[STEAMerBear]

12:38 transistors are nowhere near as small as the size of an electron. They never will be; atoms are vastly larger than electrons. Transistors are approaching the size of atoms.

[Jone]

He's saying how making computers bigger isn't a sustainable strategy yet their technology seems to be centered around inter-chip communication and allowing computers to be bigger