This is something I always thought if you could make an Optical Computer using MZI or other technologies that don't have very "exact" requirements on computation. Similar to how LLMs right now where models are run on consumer devices like a Macbook Pro where we quantize to 4 bit computations you could hypothetically just run a larger model using MZI's doing inference on those systems.

Since you are only changing the underlying model every so often instead of doing a large training loop when you setup the optical computer that can do inference it scales 2n+1 with clock speeds of to 100THz with only 100w of power vs traditional GPUs at 2GHZ with 1Kw for 15k cores.