SAN FRANCISCO, April 9 (Reuters) - Silicon Valley

startup Lightmatter revealed on Wednesday it had developed a new

type of computer chip that could both speed up artificial

intelligence work and use less electricity in the process.

Valued at $4.4 billion after raising $850 million in venture

capital, Lightmatter is one of a number of companies seeking to

use beams of light, rather than electronic signals, to move data

around more quickly between computers. Those connection speeds

are critical for artificial intelligence because the software is

so complex that it must be spread over many computers.

But Lightmatter also believes that it can use beams of light

to carry out the computation itself, which was the focus of a

paper it published in the scientific journal Nature on

Wednesday. Conventional computers use transistors, which are

akin to tiny on-off electrical switches, and gain more computing

power by making transistors smaller and cramming more onto a

chip.

In recent years, the chip industry has struggled with

shrinking those transistors. Lightmatter's chip skips those

problems by steering carefully calibrated beams of light into

one another and measuring the results with an integrated package

of chips made at its manufacturing partner GlobalFoundries ( GFS ).

Previous photonic computers struggled to compute with

precision, meaning that if the outcome of a computation was a

very small number, the chip might report the answer as a zero.

Lightmatter gets around that by breaking up very big and very

small numbers into groups before sending them through the

photonic circuits so that very small numbers do not get lost.

Nick Harris, Lightmatter's CEO, told Reuters on April 8 that

the result is a chip that can work on some current AI problems

with the same precision as conventional chips, though he said it

will likely be a decade before the technology goes mainstream.

"What we're doing is looking at the future of where

processors can go. We fundamentally care about computers, and

this is one of the alternative paths. There's trillions of

dollars of economic value that's behind the idea that computers

will keep getting better," Harris said.