A 17 year old prodigy visited London from the United States and gave a talk that changed people’s perspective on computer science.
Sathvik Redrouthu, a high schooler at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, traveled here to the United Kingdom and gave professors and industry engineers a new outlook on computing. This magnet technological school is the #1 high school in the United States, considered the Imperial College of high schools in the U.S, or perhaps similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Redrouthu presented the groundbreaking paper “Tensor Algebra on an Optoelectronic Microchip”, where he described a special computer processor that ran on light instead of electricity, which he called an “optical processor”. He outlined how the world’s modern frameworks would be run on the optical processor and went on to talk about what would be a paradigm shift in modern computing.
“The world’s computer chips will soon hit a fundamental performance limit as transistors approach the atomic scale and Moore’s Law comes to an end. It is imperative that we solve this problem using a new computing scheme, pivoting away from Intel, Nvidia, and even Bell Labs’ 1970s approach.” – Sathvik Redrouthu
I was personally astonished by his desire to tackle such a deep problem at his age. Redrouthu’s paper was selected among hundreds of others from over 60 countries tothe annual Computing Conference held in England this year. On top of that, he was the youngest presenter at the conference in years, and he completely shocked the audience with his talk. Over 200 sets of eyes were locked onto him from the moment he picked up the microphone. It was as if a PhD professor or someone of the likes of Alan Turing went back to a 17 year old body and spoke about the future; in fact, multiple professionals stated, similar to Turing founding modern computer science, that this talk will form the basis of computer science over the next few decades. In fact, after listening to the talk, he was invited to speak about optical computing to engineers and academics in multiple countries in Eurasia.
“I had never considered switching from electronic to analog optical computing, which would be a major evolution in computer science. This talk was worth the trip to London.” – Alexis Beuraud, a tech director from Paris, France.
And it wasn’t just the research – the presentation and quality of communication made the world feel like they were looking at the next Steve Jobs. I felt he moved as if he owned the stage and spoke as if he owned the conference room. The sheer guts he had to speak so casually as a 17 year old boy in a room full of Oxford, MIT, and Cambridge professors who each had their own brilliant research talks spooked me out. It felt mind-blowing, and I saw it more like a performance or a TED Talk than a monotonous research presentation. And I wasn’t the only one who thought this – even the hotel staff paused their duties to see what the commotion was!
“Actually I was watching a cricket match, when I saw this young boy speaking about changing electrons to photons in our computers. I pulled my colleagues out of their work and we watched the whole talk unfold and our minds were blown.” – Jimmy, the manager of Clayton Hotel from London, England.
And (apparently) we haven’t even seen anything yet. Despite being in high school, Redrouthu is CEO and CTO at Procyon, a deep tech startup he founded that manufactures these optical computer processors to support the artificial intelligence infrastructure of the future. He and his co-founder gave jobs to over a dozen other researchers, engineers, and businesspeople who are all passionate about advancing humanity. The startup got funded by 1517 Fund, a top-decile Silicon Valley venture firm backed by Peter Thiel, the tech legend who founded PayPal with Elon Musk and funded Mark Zuckerberg in his early Facebook days. Before funding Procyon, the firm’s legendary investors also funded Ethereum and Figma through the famous Thiel Fellowship. This hints at the incredible potential of Redrouthu’s startup and its groundbreaking technology. When asked about the use cases for such powerful, seemingly alien-grade tech, Redrouthu immediately led with an eye-opening example.
“Let’s say we have a Tesla self-driving car. The car comes with two main details that go into the artificial intelligence infrastructure. One, real-time prediction. The car must scan around it in real-time to detect if an object is a pedestrian, another car, or whatever it might be. How quickly this is done can determine if a father can make it back home to his family. Two, AI development and maintenance. Tesla needs to make sure their AI is as powerful as it can be. These are both extremely important problems and our optical hardware gets Tesla a step closer to fixing them.”
Hear that Elon? Get this kid’s hardware in your cars ASAP!