Hi, I'm Catherine Schwab, an assistant managing editor here at Forbes covering technology.

And I'm stoked to be here today with Nick Harris. He is the CEO of Light Matter, which is building AI-chip tech that is relying on light rather than electrical signals, which is how chips typically works.

So, Nick, thanks for

joining me.

Yeah, happy to be here. Excited to tell the story.

Yeah, so let's just start by talking about why light. What advantages do you have if you're

trying to use light to send information versus traditional electrical signals? Yeah, I think that gets into a little bit of the origin story for how the company got started.

Basically, if you look at how computers have scaled, how they've gotten better, faster, more efficient, cheaper, more ubiquitous

over the past, you know, 50 plus years, It's come from these concepts of Moore's Law and

Deneard scaling. Transistors would get smaller and more efficient every 18 months, about twice

for both of those quantities. That broke down in maybe 2005. And so around that time, people started

to lift their heads up and look around and try to find new sets of physics that might be able to augment how computers work and continue to drive scaling in cost, energy efficiency, and speed.

Now, there are a lot of choices. People have looked at things like carbon nanotubes. They've looked at different materials for the transistor,

which is the switch that's used in computing. But one of the areas was light. And that's what I work on

at light matter. And I worked on at MIT during my doctorate and postdoc there with my co-founder.

And the reason light's interesting is that it has a fundamentally different set of physics associated with it when you compare it to like transistors running on electrical signals.

First of all, if you think about the way the world is wired, the continents are connected using light. So the internet's running over optical fibers that are in the ocean.

Cities are connected together using light. So the internet's running over optical fibers that are in the ocean. Cities are connected together using light. So there's optical fibers buried in the ground,

and that's carrying the data. So what's special about the light?

Well, it turns out you can't send signals across really vast distances

using electrical signals because they just kind of dissipate.

The signal dies and it just goes away. With light, you're able to transport data over extreme distances.

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