Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry this may come off as rude, not my intention: The Gary Tan interview explicitly says those things, I'm not sure that's really your "take".
Fair enough, but others seem to have a different take!
True!
What Extropic is building
131–140 of 149 posts
Re: What Extropic is building
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why make such a low effort pessimistic comment. What happened to HN?
I think pointing out BS is an important part of a useful forum.
You might have responded to the wrong comment.
binoct's comment is not "pointing out BS" - that requires that you, y'know, actually point out things. binoct's comment is sneering, without any content or thought. Pure fluff.
Re: What Extropic is building
#133I’m not a fan of Extropic, but I’m seeing a lot of misconceptions here. They’re not building “a better rng”- they’re building a way to bake probabilistic models into hardware and then run inference on them using random fluctuations. Theoretically this means much faster inference for things like PGMs. See here for similar things: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09836 There’s a company called Normal Computing that did somet…
Skimmed the litepaper. Has the flavor of: you can do "simulated" annealing by literally annealing. I like the idea of using raw physics as a "hardware" accelerator, i.e. analog computing. fwiw, quantum computing can be seen as a form of analog computing. I do think that a "better rng" can be interesting and useful in and of itself. Thanks for the Normal Computing post, it felt more substantial.
with error correction, qc is entirely distinct from analog computing. that is what makes it even remotely viable, theoretically.
Re: What Extropic is building
#134I 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…
> trying to bamboozle me with jargon
Am I the only one who thought the article was clear, lucid, and reasonably concise?
The company's success or failure will depend on execution, but the value proposition is quite sound. Maybe I've just spent too much time in the intersection between information theory, thermodynamics, and signal processing...
"Don't splurge on high SNR ('digital') hardware just to re-introduce noise later." == "Don't dig a hole and fill it in again. You waste energy twice!"
Re: What Extropic is building
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Skimmed the litepaper. Has the flavor of: you can do "simulated" annealing by literally annealing. I like the idea of using raw physics as a "hardware" accelerator, i.e. analog computing. fwiw, quantum computing can be seen as a form of analog computing. I do think that a "better rng" can be interesting and useful in and of itself. Thanks for the Normal Computing post, it felt more substantial.
with error correction, qc is entirely distinct from analog computing. that is what makes it even remotely viable, theoretically.
I'm using the term "analog computing" to mean using non-digital (or even digital but in a nonstandard way). A quantum processor is not digital as each qubit has an uncountable number of states. A quantum computer would likely have a classical (digital) part to measure the quantum processor's registers, which are a bunch of "analog" states. And even if one wants to use terminology in a way that qc isn't analog, it would still objectively share many qualities with "normal" analog computing (basically all of its differentiators against classical compute).
Then again, I should probably also ask what you mean by "analog computing", and why you think quantum error correction would not allow qc to be classified as analog.
For context, I did research on crafting a high-fidelity (error-correcting) quantum gate (successfully).
Re: What Extropic is building
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, as interesting as the the chip sounds, I'm admittedly kind of biased against the company's probability of success simply because the founder is basically the #1 e/acc meme account/shitposter on Twitter. Like, it's hard to take someone seriously when they spend tons of time shitposting on Twitter, it's even harder when it's revealed that they're behind one of the most popular shitposting accounts within a ni…
Back in the day, there was a saying that went something like: Steve Jobs was really good at what he did, and also an asshole to people. The former is really hard to replicate, so instead you'll find a lot of people going around and imitating the latter. Today, it's a very different situation. Now we have Elon Musk, who is really good at what he does, and also tweets a lot...
Yeah, but Elon is one of one.
Re: What Extropic is building
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Skimmed the litepaper. Has the flavor of: you can do "simulated" annealing by literally annealing. I like the idea of using raw physics as a "hardware" accelerator, i.e. analog computing. fwiw, quantum computing can be seen as a form of analog computing. I do think that a "better rng" can be interesting and useful in and of itself. Thanks for the Normal Computing post, it felt more substantial.
I make a better RNG right now ( https://arbitrand.com ). We experimented with doing ML training with it, but it's not clear that it trains any better than a non-broken PRNG. It might be fun to feed the output into stable diffusion and see how cool the pictures are, though.
The website has a picture https://arbitrand.com/fpga.png but it is difficult to understand what it represents. Needs clarification.
Re: What Extropic is building
#138I’m not a fan of Extropic, but I’m seeing a lot of misconceptions here. They’re not building “a better rng”- they’re building a way to bake probabilistic models into hardware and then run inference on them using random fluctuations. Theoretically this means much faster inference for things like PGMs. See here for similar things: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09836 There’s a company called Normal Computing that did somet…
So it sounds like this startup is explicitly not using foundation models? Is there any evidence that such a probabilistic model can run better than a state of the art model? Or alternatively what would it take to convert an existing model (let's say, an easy one like llama2-7b) into an extropic model?
Is there any evidence that such a probabilistic model can run better than a state of the art model?
No, but they got 15M seed funding anyway.
Re: What Extropic is building
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quantum computing people have been selling this exact spiel (including the convoluted talking points) for decades and it keeps working at getting funded. It has not produced any results for the rest of us, though.
Neither has fusion research produced anything for us yet. Should we stop funding it?
Arguably yes, in a commercial sense. To give the fusion folks some credit, they haven't been promising that commercial products are "just around the corner" for the last 30 years the way QC people have, and the quacks (cold fusion) were excised from the field for making those false promises. I do think that if your field as a whole continually makes huge promises and never delivers, it should probably tarnish that field's reputation.
However, if you're thinking about research grants, no. That's the point of research grants.
Re: What Extropic is building
#140The amount of buzzwords on this page should disqualify this from even getting votes on HN. Anyone who writes like this is trying to confuse and mislead the reader.