While power consumption and speed are indeed the advantages, depending on the concrete application it may be very difficult or even impossible to make an optical computing device with a size comparable with an electronic device.

The intrinsic size of the optical computing elements is much larger, being limited by wavelength. Then a lot of additional devices are needed, for conversion between electrical and optical signals and for thermal management.

Optical computing elements can be advantageous only in the applications where electronic devices need many metallic interconnections that occupy a lot of space, while in the optical devices all those signals can pass through a layer of free space, without interfering with each other when they cross.

This kind of structure may appear when doing tensor multiplication, so there are indeed chances that optical computing could be used for AI inference.

Nevertheless, optical computing is unlikely to ever be competitive in implementing general-purpose computers. Optical computers may appear but they will be restricted to some niche applications. AI inference might be the only one that has become widespread enough to motivate R&D efforts in this direction.