81–90 of 149 posts
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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?
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.
Right. A better word is confabulation.
I.e. pseudomemories, a replacement of a gap in information with false information that is not recognized as such.
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.
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.
And also, are you the real Eliezer?
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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.
I 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…
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.
Quantum computing has been exploring an entirely new model of computation for which it's hard to even articulate the problems it can solve. Whereas using analog computers in place of digital is already well defined.
I’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…
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.
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Did they invent new DL algorithms and publish them? If I remember what I heard in the interview correctly, this targets existing architectures.
No, they're using analog computers. They point that out in the interview and the linked article.
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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.
One difference is that baking mathematical models into electronic analogs is older than integrated circuits. The reason we deviated from that model is because the re-programmability and cost of general purpose, digital computers was way more economical than bespoke hardware for expensive and temperamental single purpose analog computers. The unit economics basically killed analog computing. What Extropic (and others)…