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What Extropic is building

extropic.ai

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Re: What Extropic is building

#101

Post by adfm »

catchnear4321 wrote: post #77
adfm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of “full-stack” was the first thing I noticed. Everyone, please stop using that term. I’m pretty sure, with a high degree of certainty, you don’t know what it means. If you do, there’s a merit badge waiting for you. And can we please stop using “hallucinations” to describe output. Yes, it may look like your tool dropped acid, but that’s not what it is.

full-stack means the ic can take any ticket. do the details beyond that matter?

Buy the ticket, take the ride…

Re: What Extropic is building

#102

Post by catchnear4321 »

adfm wrote: post #101
catchnear4321 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

full-stack means the ic can take any ticket. do the details beyond that matter?

Buy the ticket, take the ride…

first you have to be told what you’re buying next.

(before that you were given the chance to object to the estimate, but not to change it.)

Re: What Extropic is building

#103

Post by adfm »

dekhn wrote: post #83
adfm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of “full-stack” was the first thing I noticed. Everyone, please stop using that term. I’m pretty sure, with a high degree of certainty, you don’t know what it means. If you do, there’s a merit badge waiting for you. And can we please stop using “hallucinations” to describe output. Yes, it may look like your tool dropped acid, but that’s not what it is.

Rob Pike once said that he was "full-stack": when he worked on Voyager, he understood the system from quantum mechanics to flight software ( https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/109763603394772405 )

No joke: The guy that coined the term is the same guy that made the merit badge. Enjoy looking that one up.

Re: What Extropic is building

#104

Post by adfm »

catchnear4321 wrote: post #102
adfm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy the ticket, take the ride…

first you have to be told what you’re buying next. (before that you were given the chance to object to the estimate, but not to change it.)

No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind.

Re: What Extropic is building

#105

Post by Animats »

ein0p wrote: post #76

People need to read Hamming’s old papers in which he very clearly explains why analog circuits are not viable at scale. This is also why the brain uses spikes rather than continuous signals. The issue is noise, interference, and attenuation. There’s no way to get around this. If they have invented a way, I’d like to see it. But until it’s demonstrated, I’d take such things with a large grain of salt.

You can re-quantize analog signals into a finite number of levels to prevent noise accumulation. That's how TLC (8 levels) and QLC (16 levels) flash memory cells work. The cells store an analog value, but it's forced to a value close to one of N discrete values. The same approach is used in modems.

Deep learning doesn't seem to need that much numerical precision. People started with 32-bit floats, then 16-bit floats, now sometimes 8-bit floats, and recently there are people talking up 2-bit trinary. The number of levels needed may not be too much for analog. If you have a regenerator once in a while to slot values back to the allowed discrete levels, you can clean up the noise. That's an analog to digital to analog conversion, of course.

That's not what these guys are talking about, as far as I can tell.

Re: What Extropic is building

#106

Post by pclmulqdq »

adfm wrote: post #68
binoct wrote: post #51

I really hope this was an experiment in using gen AI: “Create a website for a new company that is building the next generation of computing hardware to power AI software. Make sure it sounds science-y but don’t be too specific.”

The use of “full-stack” was the first thing I noticed. Everyone, please stop using that term. I’m pretty sure, with a high degree of certainty, you don’t know what it means. If you do, there’s a merit badge waiting for you. And can we please stop using “hallucinations” to describe output. Yes, it may look like your tool dropped acid, but that’s not what it is.

I now think of the "stack" of a modern business as starting with physics and ending with making someone happy (unless you are Oracle). Full-stack engineers should then know how to connect physics to peoples' happiness.

Re: What Extropic is building

#107

Post by 015a »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #10

Man, I am not a pessimist and I am very bullish on AI-the-field but my spidey sense is tingling that this is BS. - It is written in a way that sacrifices legibility for supposed precision but because the terms used can't really be applied precisely, it's equivalent to spurious digits in a scientific calculation. The usual reason this occurs is to obfuscate or to overawe the audience. - It is hard to overstate the dif…

For me its the dichotomy between how absolutely impenetrable the blog post is, combined with the "Set the tone fam, play 'Entropy' by Noizinski on Spotify :)" widget in the bottom right. Like they're trying to check every box on the engagement farming list (something, to be sure, beff jezos is famous for).

Very bad vibes. Hire someone who can communicate, and demonstrate what you're building.

Re: What Extropic is building

#108

Post by semi-extrinsic »

zoogeny wrote: post #100
autonomousErwin wrote: post #38

I wouldn't want to write this off because you get the feeling these guys are on to something that could be hugely important (ignoring quantum this thermodynamic that) - but surely it feels like they need to get to the point a lot faster e.g. "We're taking a new approach to building chips for AI because transistors can't get any smaller." I really don't know what they gain by convoluting the point and it's pretty hard…

Your summary seems to miss a later quote from the article: > Extropic is also building semiconductor devices that operate at room temperature to extend our reach to a larger market. These devices trade the Josephson junction for the transistor. Doing so sacrifices some energy efficiency compared to superconducting devices. In exchange, it allows one to build them using standard manufacturing processes and supply chai…

> Doing so sacrifices some energy efficiency compared to superconducting devices.

In most applications superconductivity does not actually yield better energy efficiency at system level, since it turns out cooling stuff to negative several hundred degrees is quite energy demanding.

Re: What Extropic is building

#109

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

blovescoffee wrote: post #27
vipshek wrote: post #24

I have no idea about the merits of this approach, but I found this interview with the founders a lot more sensical than the linked article: https://twitter.com/Extropic_AI/status/1767203839818781085

This interview makes their product seem like BS. First, they literally cannot simply explain the problem or solution. Regardless, their pitch is that they're building a more power efficient probability distribution sampler. No one in AI research thinks that's a bottleneck. edit: btw the bottleneck in AI algos is matrix multiply and memory bandwith.

My take on the Garry Tan interview (which seems pretty clear, regardless of whether this is snake oil or not) is that Extropic are building low power analog chips because we're hitting up against the limits of Moore's Law (limit's of physics in reducing transistor size), and at the same time the power consumption for LLM/AI training and inference is starting to get out of hand.

So, their solution is to embrace the stochastic operation of smaller chip geometries where transistors become unreliable, and double down on it by running the chips at low power where the stochasticity is even worse. They are using an analog chip design/architecture of some sort (presumably some sort of matmul equivalent?) and using a "full-stack" design whereby they have custom software to run neural nets on their chips, taking advantage of the fact the neural nets can tolerate, and utilize, randomness.

Re: What Extropic is building

#110

Post by g8oz »

swalsh wrote: post #66
binoct wrote: post #51

I really hope this was an experiment in using gen AI: “Create a website for a new company that is building the next generation of computing hardware to power AI software. Make sure it sounds science-y but don’t be too specific.”

Why make such a low effort pessimistic comment. What happened to HN?

Snark has always been part of this website.
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