Artificial intelligence is not only big business, estimated to reach over $422 billion in global spending by 2028, it requires big data computing on a scale few can comprehend.
AI research efforts from Alphabet’s DeepMindAI, Meta, OpenAI and others are pushing the current known capabilities of today’s computing environments. These algorithms get better by getting bigger. The total computing power required to train the world’s biggest AI model has been doubling every three and a half months for the past several years, far outpacing Moore's law.
Luminous Computing Founders (l) Marcus Gomez and (r) Michael Nahmias.
Luminous Computing is trying to change that dynamic. The Mountain View, California-based start-up, founded in 2018 by Marcus Gomez, CEO, Mitchell Nahmias, CTO and Michael Gao (who has since left the company), plans to push revolutionary technological advances to maximize artificial intelligence through the development of a new supercomputer built on photonics chips. The following founder’s journey story is based on my interviews with Gomez and Nahmais.
“Ten years ago, the largest AI models took maybe an hour to train on a single machine. The biggest models today take months on tens of thousands of machines requiring hundreds of engineers. The problem is that we've maxed out the capability of existing hardware,” says Gomez. Luminous looks to build a supercomputer that can support the next generation of AI.
The Luminous founders set out to solve the challenge of providing orders of magnitude improvements in computing performance without giving up on ease of use, programmability and customer experience in order to make good on their mission to make AI fulfill its potential to automate many aspects of human activity to improve life. It turns out that the bottleneck is communication—between chips, between memories, between boards, between boxes and between racks. And according to Gomez and his co-founders, the answer lies in photonics-based computer architecture.
“I come from an optics background. And we know that optics solves this communication problem. And that's why we use optics to send data across oceans and across racks in a data center. So, we're putting optics into the computer architecture to solve this problem directly,” says Nahmais. Luminous aims to use optics to solve the data movement problem by re-architecting the system with optics to break past the previously intractable performance-usability curve to offer both ease of use and performance and eliminate the complexity of the software stack.
Four years into the creation of Luminous, the company is still about 20 months away from production, though Gomez says that the company already has customers ready to go once they do. However, the promise of the concept and the pedigree and progress the founders and their growing team of engineers have made to date has allowed the company to attract the level of venture capital required to build and produce a new photonics-based supercomputer.
The company has attracted $126 million in funding to date, according to Gomez. Their latest A round was raised on March 3, 2022 for $105 million. Investors include Modern Venture Partners, Horsley Bridge Partners, Third Kind Venture Capital, 8090 Partners, Bill Gates, Neo, Alumni Partners, Strawberry Creek Ventures, Gigafund and others.
Gomez is the son of Indian immigrants who came to the US with less than $1,000 to their name. They settled in a small farm town in Minnesota. “Growing up I didn't really have exposure to technology. My exposure to cutting edge technology was through pop science magazines,” says Gomez. He was inspired by Steve Jobs’ admonition to think big and came to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford because he wanted to work on solving foundational human problems and artificial intelligence was supposed to be the bedrock on which next step innovations would come from. He graduated from Stanford with a degree in computer science and then worked in the field of artificial intelligence, both during his degree work and later for Google before meeting Nahmias in 2018 when they came together to form Luminous Computing.
“I didn't get my driver's licence until I was 22 because I was so sure that self driving cars would be readily available,” says Gomez. But when he came to Silicon Valley, he was disappointed and frustrated because the gap between what he thought was possible and what was actually happening on the ground was still too big. He had been doing various types of artificial intelligence work for about a decade at this point. And when Nahmais showed him what he had been working on, it was immediately apparent that if they could pull off anything remotely close to what he had been working on, it would be step change in artificial intelligence.
Nahmias grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley in Menlo Park, California, but left California to attend college at Princeton in New Jersey to walk the same halls as the college’s most famous lecturer and scientist, Albert Einstein. “I came to Princeton to learn how to build the next supercomputer,” says Nahmais. He thought at the time that the solution to building the next AI supercomputer was to come up with a way of using physics to build new devices to build new technologies. He would go on to earn his Ph.D for his pioneering work in the field of Neuromorphic Photonics. When he met Gomez, he realised that it's not just physics. It’s supply chains, economics and usability that matter as much as the physics.
Expectations for the company are running high, though whether or not Luminous can make good on its promise, only time will tell. But Gomez is not short on thinking big. “The minimum expectation that we've set for ourselves is that we want to be the hardware provider that every AI practitioner on Earth uses,” concludes Gomez.
