Image: OFC Conference 2026 Artificial intelligence can trace its symbolic birth back to the Dartmouth Conference in the summer of 1956. It had to be a wild concept at the time, a gathering of academic researchers that pondered the concept of machines that could think. Seven decades later, it has become a mainstream reality. Since the introduction of ChatGPT four years ago, and amid today’s rapid acceleration of agentic frameworks, compute has remained a focal point as GPU silicon evolves. However, the ultimate bottleneck of scaling modern AI applications and workloads is the advancement of networking infrastructure, and optical networking will play a significant role. As expected, AI infrastructure anchored…