This is a neat idea, but it's extremely light (no pun intended) on real details. Translating a simulation into real hardware that can do real computation in a reliable manner is properly hard. As much as I'd love to be an optimist about this project, I have to say I'll believe it when I see it actually running on a workbench.
If it does work, I think one of the biggest challenges will be adding enough complexity to it for it to do real, useful computation. Running the equivalent of GPT-2 is a cool tech demo, but if there's not an obvious path to scaling it up, it's a bit of a dead end.
Oh absolutely...this is kitchen-table level at this point. There is a clear path to really huge number of parameters, but a bunch of things need to be proven first. Like...can the detector meaningfully read what comes out the end of the optical chain?
If it does work, I think one of the biggest challenges will be adding enough complexity to it for it to do real, useful computation. Running the equivalent of GPT-2 is a cool tech demo, but if there's not an obvious path to scaling it up, it's a bit of a dead end.