Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. Recently, I talked about a team of researchers in the US that had managed to 3D print an Artificial Intelligence (AI) neural network, and another team that had made a complex neural network from DNA. But now, in another new development in the field of what's known as Diffractive Neural Networks, a team of researchers have created the smartest piece of glass in the known universe. Zongfu Yu at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues have created a glass based AI that uses light to recognise and distinguish between images. What's more, the glass AI doesn't need to be powered to operate.

Zongfu Yu at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues have created a glass artificial intelligence that uses light to recognise and distinguish between images. What's more, the glass AI doesn't need to be powered to operate. The proof-of-principle glass AI that Yu's team created can distinguish between handwritten single digit numbers. It can also recognise, in real time, when a number it is presented with changes – for instance, when a 3 is altered to an 8. The AI works by taking advantage of small bubbles deliberately incorporated into the glass, as well as embedded impurities such as graphene. As the light waves reflected off the handwritten numbers pass through the glass AI, they are bent in specific ways by the bubbles and impurities.