He clearly said "very limited application" because it depends on sunlight availability. I'm fairly sure it's possible to run C program (since Lightelligence already made device to run AI), but applications which need to be run all the time/without downtime certainly won't use optical computing.
can you give an example of something that needs to "run all the time without downtime"? bitcoin mining is not such an example.
Well, to be fair to ETFbitcoin, I think most people would mine 24/7 if that was also the most economical mining schedule. But you're right, with this technique the mining would only occur at those times when the intensity of available sunlight is sufficient, which means the miners would not "run all the time without downtime". However, sunlight availability was the primary reason why I wrote that the application of this technology would probably be very limited.
However, if I really allow my imagination to run wild, perhaps this technology could be applied to
all data centers. Again, I am not an expert, and this would certainly be an enormous engineering challenge... but, theoretically, if sunlight could be concentrated into a single source of very intense and powerful coherent light, and that light could be sufficiently split and distributed amongst many computers... and
if the fresnel lens apparatus (which concentrates the sunlight into coherent light) could seamlessly be swapped for an artificially powered, high-intensity laser during the night to produce an equivalent source of coherent light, then I suppose this could also provide large efficiency benefits to regular ol' data centers. However, I think we're still something like a decade away from general purpose optical computers becoming commercialized.
Additionally, I briefly read that solar-pumped lasers could be used to concentrate sunlight to the effect of increasing the efficiency of solar panels, or something like that, but that has nothing to do with the optical computing stuff.
