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What Extropic is building
141–149 of 149 posts
Re: What Extropic is building
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That looks like the placement of their circuit on the FPGA. Like a screenshot from ChipPlanner in Quartus
Re: What Extropic is building
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud RNG number streaming is interesting but costly, no? I did have the idea to serve truly random numbers via a quantum computer (trivial by just preparing the simplest state and measuring). Anything else can't be said to be truly random.
You don't need a quantum computer to sample noise from quantum processes. It's a prohibitively expensive way to go, and depending on how you built the quantum computer, it may be more susceptible to interference and non-quantum noise than using good circuits and custom systems.
Oh sure, it was more of a joke app idea, or in another sense, for those who want philosophically "perfect" randomness. After all, assuming a single bit sample, anything but a hadamard state has nonoptimal entropy. Of course, it makes almost no sense to sample a bit at a time since we want pragmatism. But having a virtual coin flip essentially "create" a new, nonexistent bit of information in the universe -- that's funny (well, assuming certain interpretations of QM).
Re: What Extropic is building
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a suspicion that a lot of people are nodding along because they don't want to seem like the village idiot.
on the other hand, HN is filled with self-proclaimed critics that they dismiss everything and display their utter lack of imagination -- like AI, Metaverse, (success of) Snapchat, AirPods before
Did HN dismiss AI? I saw some skepticism and still do but not dismissal.
This site doesn’t get everything right. It tends to miss things that succeed in the consumer space because this is a pro audience not a mainstream audience. But it usually gets hard science right.
Re: What Extropic is building
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree. I just come away from the article feeling more confused as opposed to enlightened and excited about what they're building. It even makes me think that they don't understand what they're talking about which is why they're using complicated terminology to mask it but I'm hopeful I'm wrong and this is an engineering innovation that benefits everyone.
I get that feeling, too. There may or may not be something there, but the article is mostly buzzword-slinging. They wrote "This will allow us to put an Extropic accelerator in every home, enabling everyone to partake in the thermodynamic AI acceleration." Huh? If they said something like "We are trying to cut the cost of stable diffusion by a factor of 100", that would sort of make sense. But then people would want t…
A proof-of-concept would be amazing and that's what I thought they were releasing and would justify the hype (as opposed to a whitepaper). Maybe in a couple of months we'll see a HN post doing exactly this and we can eat our words (which I really hope is the case).
Re: What Extropic is building
#146I 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?
^ How to spot a sucker
Re: What Extropic is building
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
honestly, it would be too early to say this. Considering the people who invested in this startup, its better to assume CEO is capable. If he is not able to deliver in reasonable timeline then, we all are free to blame him for posting things on SM. actually many knows his company because he is goofing around on SM especially e/acc stuff.
It's more interesting to see who passed on it. There isn't a single top tier VC here. This whole pitch sounds like the usual quantum computing babble.
exactly!! most of the large accounts hyping this stuff up are invested in it or dont seem to have a clear idea of what they invested in and/or part of the inner clique. also there doesn't seem to any serious hardware investors in that group - more folks who have bought into e/acc and all the scifi mythos around it.
Re: What Extropic is building
#148People 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.
analog circuits are making a comeback because they are great for simulating the equations of the physical world more efficiently than a digital approach.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/not-your-fathers-analog-computer
Re: What Extropic is building
#149Physical learning machines require noise to learn. They are also necessarily dissipative. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11954. The key is to engineer the noise to maximise the learning rate. In classical devices, stochastic switching is controlled by temperature through the Kramers rate. This means kT controls energy loss. If you use dissipative quantum tunnelling this is not the true thermodynamic lower bound. Any quantum nonlinear dissipative system, with a far from equilibrium steady state, is a good case to consider. Dispersive optical bistability, realised in SC quantum circuits, is the way to go. And quantum error correction is unnecessary.