Forget silicon chips—someone built an AI that thinks using radio waves bouncing around inside a metal box.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.13602
The Takeaway
Rather than using electricity to flip billions of transistors on a chip, this device uses the natural physics of how waves scatter off surfaces to process information. This could lead to hyper-fast AI that runs at the speed of light and consumes almost zero power compared to today's energy-hungry data centers.
From the abstract
Wave-based signal processing conventionally encodes input data into the input wavefront, making it challenging to implement non-linear operations. Programmable wave systems enable an alternative approach: encoding the input data into the scattering properties of tunable components. With such structural input encoding, two potentially non-linear mappings are involved: first, from the input data to the tunable components' scattering characteristics, and, second, from these scattering characteristi