'Beyond human intuition': AI designs chip components 500 times smaller than what engineers could ever imagine Three new AI-designed chip components are just a few micrometers long and go beyond what human engineers have previously envisaged. Scientists have successfully shrunk three components used in photonic microchips by up to 500 times, leaving considerably more space for other on-chip functionality. The achievement was made possible with an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that generated these tiny designs, which the researchers described as "beyond human intuition." Whereas conventional microchips use electrons to transmit and process information, photonic microchips utilize particles of light (photons). They can therefore process and transmit data much faster than electronic chips can, because photons can carry information at the speed of light. They also offer higher bandwidth, as different wavelengths can carry distinct data streams, and they lose less energy as heat. As a result, photonic chips are used where fast, high-bandwidth data transmission is essential, such as in fiber-optic communications, data centers, AI, lidar systems for autonomous vehicles, and quantum computing. Instead of metal wires, micrometer-wide channels called waveguides direct light across the photonic chip. These chips also contain wavelength splitters, spatial mode sorters and mirrors — all of which are essential for separating and directing different wavelengths and light patterns within a footprint a fraction of the width of a human hair. In the new study, the scientists used AI-generated designs to fabricate these three components on an ultracompact scale. They published their findings May 28 in the journal Nature Communications. The newly available on-chip space could allow engineers to "unlock new functionalities" by packing on more components, the researchers wrote in the study. Notably, the work demonstrates that AI can produce boundary-pushing chip designs that are also practical to manufacture. AI worked backward to generate the