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What Extropic is building

extropic.ai

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71–80 of 149 posts

Re: What Extropic is building

#71

Post by blovescoffee »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #46
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.

Vaguely though what they are talking about sounds like it might be better for training? (I'm really stretching it here)

Yes that's stretching the truth

Re: What Extropic is building

#72

Post by zachbee »

They're not wrong that sampling a complex, higher-dimensional probability distribution is hard to do efficiently. I'm not sure how useful it is to do it more efficiently, though.

Also, the fact that they're using ultra-cold superconductors makes me wonder how much noise helps and how much it hurts. If your system is all about leveraging noise well, but you can only use super special well-behaved noise, then "bad noise" could easily ruin the quality of your generated solutions.

It's cool to see something so wacky out there, though!

Re: What Extropic is building

#73

Post by catchnear4321 »

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?

same thing that is happening everywhere. cognitive effort is getting unbalanced, it used to be necessary to put effort in on write, and on read.

now, it is hard to tell who put effort in at all. read or write.

would you consider your own response to be optimistic or high effort?

Re: What Extropic is building

#74

Post by ac2u »

rvz wrote: post #31

Too early to tell about what this will be in the future. Either it turns out to be a foundational startup or a flash in a pan. But at least it is not the 5000th so-called AI-powered SaaS company that is using OpenAI API that has raised $20M+ to VCs and burning hundreds of thousands every month with little to no plan to generate revenue. Will be watching this one closely, but highly skeptical of this company.

Hear hear, better to see someone go for broke trying something novel.

At best they advance the field massively, at worst the backers lose their money but the tech/knowledge finds a home elsewhere and the knowledge in the field is nudged forward.

Re: What Extropic is building

#75

Post by adw »

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?

HN has always been a tense standoff between a few cliques, the first two being the ostensibly intended audience;

* competent and curious engineers

* entrepreneurs, who live on a continuum where one end is...

* ...hucksters and snake-oil purveyors, of which there are plenty, and

* (because this is the Internet) conspiracy theorists and other such loons

and recently

* political provocateurs

You can make a thread work (for that group of people) if it self-selects who reads it. Unfortunately, AI is catnip to all five of these groups, so the average thread quality is exceptionally low – it serves all five groups badly.

Whether some of these people _should_ be served well is a separate question.

Re: What Extropic is building

#76

Post by ein0p »

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.

Re: What Extropic is building

#77

Post by catchnear4321 »

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.

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

Re: What Extropic is building

#78

Post by nfw2 »

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?

[flagged]

Re: What Extropic is building

#79

Post by Eliezer »

I'm saddened to see the honorable name of Extropy and Extropianism, which carefully never descended to this level or anything like it, be stolen and captured by this nonsense.

Re: What Extropic is building

#80

Post by Eliezer »

blueblimp wrote: post #56
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 was definitely easier to follow. Since they're building a special-purpose accelerator for a certain class of models, what I'd like to see is some evidence that those models can achieve competitive performance (once the hardware is mature). Namely, simulate these models on conventional hardware to determine how effective they are, then estimate what the cost would be to run the same model on Extropic's future har…

Ah, but running an experiment like that risks it returning an answer you don't like.
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