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Will I ever own a zettaflop?

geohot.github.io

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Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#41

Post by bee_rider »

nl wrote: post #10

Firstly, True Names is an awesome read, and the real origin of cyberpunk. I much prefer it to Neuromancer or Diamond Age. Secondly, I recently tried to work out what year on the Top500 list[1] I could reasonably be for around US$5000. It's surprisingly difficult to work out mostly because they use 64 bit flops and few other systems quote that number. [1] https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/11/

I looked at something kinda similar a little bit ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303483

Jeff Geerling made a $3000 raspberry pi cluster and shared the linpack scores, so I looked at when it’d hit different spots in the top500 list. He’d have won from ‘93 to June ‘96, and then been knocked out of the top 10 in November ‘97.

That’s with a pretty substantial constraint, making it out of raspberry pi’s, and a lower budget. With $5000, and your pick of chips… I bet you could hit the turn of the century…

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#42

Post by emaadm »

mysecretaccount wrote: post #36

Fun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example: > One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one. We…

> We are already near the limits of what we can do

Hard disagree. If I had a million Claudes worth of compute I'd be livestreaming my entire reality feed to a local server 24/7 and having it organize my observations and thoughts, synthesize new ideas, implement prototypes and discard infeasible ones while I sleep. If you're in the business of knowledge creation, a million Claudes isn't enough. Text is an easy modality, I want foundation models that operate on text, images, audio, video, streaming point clouds, ...

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#43

Post by Dylan16807 »

echelon wrote: post #5

There's no way we're not living in a historical simulation. This is all just such crazy coincidence. Everything is coming together so quickly.

For the "coincidence" part: While technology has been advancing very fast, the human population also ballooned alongside that advancement, so the odds of any particular intelligent Earthling being born in such an era of growth are pretty high.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#44

Post by kubb »

Human appetite for more knows no bounds. Imagine what we’d have to do for everyone to have a zettaflop. We won’t have the resources for it. So guys like this one are in competition with normal people who just need a little bit of compute, so that he can feel powerful with a million Claudes. Sad.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#45

Post by kombine »

kubb wrote: post #44

Human appetite for more knows no bounds. Imagine what we’d have to do for everyone to have a zettaflop. We won’t have the resources for it. So guys like this one are in competition with normal people who just need a little bit of compute, so that he can feel powerful with a million Claudes. Sad.

Poor mother Earth, this race is unsustainable. In order to satiate guys like geohot we are pillaging the natural resources, destroying ecosystems, fucking up the climate.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#47

Post by voidUpdate »

jmyeet wrote: post #8

I'm a big believer that humanity's future is in space in a Dyson Swarm. There are simply too many advantages. It's estimated that humanity currently uses ~10^11 Watts of power. About 10^16 Watts of solar energy hits the Earth but the Earth's cross-section is less than a billionth of the Sun's total energy output. A Dyson Swarm would give us access to ~10^25 Watts of power. With our current population that would give…

If we absorb all of the sun's energy using a dyson swarm, the earth is going to get very cold and dark

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#48

Post by Havoc »

Fun hypothetical

I’d say there odd a bit of a flaw in the read 50,000 books part though. The LLM reading that much doesn’t really get you 50k books of value as a person. You’re the bottleneck not the flops

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#49

Post by mysecretaccount »

emaadm wrote: post #42
mysecretaccount wrote: post #36

Fun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example: > One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one. We…

> We are already near the limits of what we can do Hard disagree. If I had a million Claudes worth of compute I'd be livestreaming my entire reality feed to a local server 24/7 and having it organize my observations and thoughts, synthesize new ideas, implement prototypes and discard infeasible ones while I sleep. If you're in the business of knowledge creation, a million Claudes isn't enough. Text is an easy modalit…

Using a single Claude agent, ask it to generate "new" ideas and it will generate an immense list. Ask it to rank those ideas by novelty and it will comply.

The results will be lackluster. Additional agents will not improve the result.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#50

Post by noduerme »

kubb wrote: post #44

Human appetite for more knows no bounds. Imagine what we’d have to do for everyone to have a zettaflop. We won’t have the resources for it. So guys like this one are in competition with normal people who just need a little bit of compute, so that he can feel powerful with a million Claudes. Sad.

For one thing, most news websites would have to load at least 10,000x as much useless javascript to achieve the same performance.
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