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What Extropic is building

extropic.ai

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Re: What Extropic is building

#61

Post by patcon »

I believe this link is communicating within the family of thought from which this blog post also comes:

https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/

It's a random, unassuming 7-year-old blog post from a DARPA-funded and defense-involved inventor. They happen to work in neuromorphic computing. Their other posts talk about some of that work. A cynical take is that it can seem like just hand-wavey garbage, but then again, it's been quietly getting tons of defense contractor money.

I came across it years ago, and it has greatly accelerated my worldview, and has made me feel ahead of the curve in understanding what is going on in the universe. It's informed my community organizing. It's informed how I understand AI and consciousness and language, and the intersection of all these things.

I'm inclined to believe that the people in this area are clued into something very substantial about how the universe works.

EDIT: oops, shared the wrong link. This one is about thermodynamic evolution

Re: What Extropic is building

#62

Post by horrysith »

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.”

[flagged]

Re: What Extropic is building

#64

Post by duped »

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 understanding is that the goal of these approaches are to avoid those bottlenecks.

Re: What Extropic is building

#66

Post by swalsh »

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?

Re: What Extropic is building

#67

Post by huevosabio »

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

Much, much better. The first minute or so explains what they are trying to do and why in a way the I can understand.

This interview makes me much more excited and less skeptic than Verdon's usual mumbo-jumbo jargon. He should try using simpler, and more humble language more often.

Re: What Extropic is building

#68

Post by adfm »

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.

Re: What Extropic is building

#69

Post by blovescoffee »

ninjin wrote: post #33
blovescoffee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Computationally, yes, those are the bottlenecks. But I would also add supervised training data, as we can never get enough of that and it is one of few things that increases in compute are (to my mind, you could argue that by scaling unsupervised training further we could do away with it, but I am not yet convinced) not able to solve.

Their startup is addressing computing bottlenecks so that's what I addressed. Supervised training dat isn't a bottleneck on LLMs, Diffusion models, or any of the hot areas at the moment.

Re: What Extropic is building

#70

Post by blovescoffee »

duped wrote: post #64
blovescoffee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understanding is that the goal of these approaches are to avoid those bottlenecks.

Did they invent new DL algorithms and publish them? If I remember what I heard in the interview correctly, this targets existing architectures.
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