Light-based AI image generator uses almost no power

An AI image generator that uses light to produce images, rather than conventional computing hardware, could consume hundreds of times less energy. When an artificial intelligence model produces an image from text, it typically uses a process called diffusion. The AI is first shown a large collection of images and shown how to destroy them using statistical noise, then it encodes these patterns in a set of rules. When it is given a new, noisy image, it can use these rules to do the same thing in reverse: over many steps, it works towards a coherent image that matches a given text request. For realistic, high-resolution images, diffusion uses many sequential steps that require a significant level of computing power.