A Boston startup showed it could store 14 gigabytes of data from Wikipedia in DNA molecules, which look like a few drops of water in a test tube
By Sara Castellanos Feb. 4, 2020 12:23 pm ET BOSTON—Engineers working at a startup near touristy Faneuil Hall Marketplace are building chips that use laser beams instead of electrical signals to run artificial-intelligence applications 10 times faster than today’s most advanced AI computer chips, using one-tenth of the energy.
The market for new computing technology comes as advancements in traditional chip making are hitting a physical limit under Moore’s Law, the idea that every two years or so, the number of transistors in a chip doubles. Three miles northwest of Lightmatter’s headquarters, another Boston startup, Catalog Technologies Inc., is developing a unique way of storing large amounts of data. The company recently showed it could store 14 gigabytes of data from Wikipedia.org in DNA molecules, which look like a few drops of water in a test tube.
Devin Leake, the company’s chief science officer, said the startup is benefiting from the momentum of cutting-edge computing methods. “The groundwork that quantum computing has done—and the idea of neuromorphic computing—has laid the foundation for considering alternatives,” Mr. Leake said. Mr. Moehring co-founded venture-capital firm Cambium Capital Partners in 2018 to invest in cutting-edge computing startups. Among them is Vorticity Inc., founded last summer by Chirath Neranjena, who previously worked for Alphabet Inc.’s research arm X. Vorticity is revamping chips by reorganizing components such as memory in order to make them more efficient. The goal is to speed up complex scientific calculations for industries including mining and aerospace.
For more than three years, the Germany-based company has been experimenting with using quantum computing for various applications, including speeding up the time it takes to train neural networks, one of the key AI technologies underpinning self-driving cars.
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