Photonics for Energy in the Age of AI

The growth in generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), in the last several years has been unparalleled, with numerous LLM systems going through step-edge increases in capabilities and number of users worldwide. The pace of progress appears to be only accelerating, with LLMs such OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama, Anthropic's Claude, Mistral's Large, and xAI's Grok, to name a few, competing for top scores in a variety of benchmarks. Fundamental research in deep learning with origins in parallel distributed processing has been ongoing for decades, 3,4 but the recent advances in LLM capabilities have seemingly crossed a threshold such that AI can now potentially help us in nearly every aspect of our work and, perhaps soon, daily lives. We now find ourselves in new terrain in trying to understand, explore, and benefit from the realm of possible use cases of AI.