Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Extropic is building

extropic.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 149 posts

Re: What Extropic is building

#21

Post by nfw2 »

jdulay19 wrote: post #2

Could someone smarter than me explain if this is a big deal or just hype? The work sound promising, but I wonder how long it would take to build and validate.

My takeaway is that the chip's goal is to provide a way to produce random numbers with some configurable distribution that is faster and more energy efficient.

As far as the feasibility and impact on AI in general, I have no idea.

Re: What Extropic is building

#22

Post by swatcoder »

jdulay19 wrote: post #2

Could someone smarter than me explain if this is a big deal or just hype? The work sound promising, but I wonder how long it would take to build and validate.

It's a startup with well-credential and very technical founders and a fair seed round focused on accelerating one bottleneck in a newly popular computing paradigm using techniques that are known in research but never yet commercialized.

It might fail for the reasons many startups fail, but it's not prima facie fantasy.

Re: What Extropic is building

#23

Post by api »

jdulay19 wrote: post #2

Could someone smarter than me explain if this is a big deal or just hype? The work sound promising, but I wonder how long it would take to build and validate.

Sounds like a really convoluted new agey way of talking about some kind of analog computing.

AFAIK there are other efforts to develop analog neural network ASICs. Since neural networks are noise-tolerant this could work and could allow faster computations than conventional must-be-perfect digital circuits. IBM, Intel, and others have experimented with this.

I wouldn't believe there's anything particularly novel here unless a lot more detail or test hardware is given.

I'm not 100% sure this is true but I've heard that this fellow was involved with the NFT craze and made money there, and that sets off alarm bells. I've suspected for a while that e/acc is a marketing thing since it's just repackaging old extropian stuff from the 1990s.

"I want to believe" but have seen enough to be skeptical of extreme claims without hard evidence.

Re: What Extropic is building

#25

Post by gitfan86 »

thatguysaguy wrote: post #20

Uninmportant, but if you're citing Moore's paper I feel like you're just trying to pad out the references to make it look like you're serious

At a high level it is the right answer to the data center electricity demand problem. Which is that we need to make AI hardware more efficient.

Pragmatically, it doesn't make much sense given that it would take years for this approach to have any real work use cases in a best case scenario. It seems way more likey that efficiency gains in digital chips will happen first making these chips less economically valuable.

Re: What Extropic is building

#26

Post by pclmulqdq »

the__alchemist wrote: post #13
jdulay19 wrote: post #2

Could someone smarter than me explain if this is a big deal or just hype? The work sound promising, but I wonder how long it would take to build and validate.

After skimming the article, go back to the beginning, and ponder the opening stanza: > We are very excited to finally share more about what Extropic is building: a full-stack hardware platform to harness matter's natural fluctuations as a computational resource for Generative AI. This is New Age, dressed up with the latest fashion.

As far as I can tell, as someone with relevant hardware expertise, this is a quantum machine learning startup.

Re: What Extropic is building

#27

Post by blovescoffee »

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.

Re: What Extropic is building

#28

Post by Delumine »

Seems like they're "passive" energy chips are only gonna be targeted $$$ towards big organizations, which make use of the Josephon effect. But if they're targeting transistor technology for the masses, how will they have an advantage against the incumbents

Re: What Extropic is building

#29

Post by empath-nirvana »

So, basically this seems to be a way to replace PRNGs with real randomness with some knobs so you can adjust the distribution. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this can replace every single PRNG call in inference and training, how much savings in cost/energy/run time would there actually be?

Re: What Extropic is building

#30

Post by pclmulqdq »

spiantino wrote: post #14
the__alchemist wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After skimming the article, go back to the beginning, and ponder the opening stanza: > We are very excited to finally share more about what Extropic is building: a full-stack hardware platform to harness matter's natural fluctuations as a computational resource for Generative AI. This is New Age, dressed up with the latest fashion.

So exciting! We'd be walking amongst our GAI brethren this very day if it weren't for the computational limits of those pesky RNGs!

I can sell you a solution to that in AWS/Azure (or on prem) today if you really want to use a TRNG for your ML training :)

They are very energy efficient (measured in pJ/bit), but non-cryptographic PRNGs, which are typical for ML, are far more efficient.

It's not obviously wrong to think that AI algorithms will pick up bias from "overfitting" to their PRNGs used during training, but I'm not expecting the benefits to be very large.

Post reply on HN