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Will I ever own a zettaflop?

geohot.github.io

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Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#81

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sfn42 wrote: post #73
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call this the Laurie Anderson fallacy, from a line in one of her songs: > "Heaven is exactly like where you are right now, but much, much better." If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine - in the same way that Alan Turing imagined machines learning from experience, but didn't i…

There's nothing (except their capacity and your token budget I guess) stopping anyone from having a million simultaneous conversations with Claude right now. Maybe a million is a stretch but thousands is completely doable right now. That's thousands of Claudes. Knock yourself out.

But that's the point. No human has the capacity to handle a million simultaneous conversations, any million-sized workflow would have to be AI-managed itself, and it's not even clear what the goals would be.

If it ever becomes possible to say "build me a unicorn" you're going to get millions of people trying to do the same thing, and you no longer have the same economy.

Because the features that generate unicorns stop being unusual.

Startup slop instead of art slop.

Which is the real problem with AI. Work gets cheap, original value stays expensive no matter how much compute you throw at it.

Because if it gets cheap too, it gets commoditised and stops being valuable.

And globally that applies to everything.

AI will either have to be tightly rationed, or it will murder the competitive economy.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#82

Post by ehnto »

eru wrote: post #64
ehnto wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that's a bit uncharitable, it wasn't just vibes, it was imaginative world building, with some truly interesting and novel concepts tied into a decent enough story to enjoy the world within. As with much from this thread of cyberpunk writing, the cities and world are the most important characters, and the storyline is just an excuse to wander through their streets.

'Vibes' was probably the wrong word. I agree with you. Though about the world building: he threw out a lot of neologisms on the page, and later other writers gave them meaning.

That's true, I read Neuromancer pretty late, already well primed on the terms of art which smoothed that over a bit. But a lot was left to the imagination.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#83

Post by extraduder_ire »

throw0101d wrote: post #71
tbrownaw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes. Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available. Some random search results say the global hard drive market is around an eighth of a billion units, but of course much of that will be smaller sizes. So that should be physically realizable today (well, with today's commercial technology), with only a few years of global productio…

> Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available. For the record, 44TB drives have been announced in March 2026: * https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/stories/articles/seagate-deliv...

SSDs have outclassed hard drives in density for a while now. Kioxia claims their LC9 is over 245TB in capacity, announced July 2025.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#84

Post by extraduder_ire »

danw1979 wrote: post #53
userbinator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dyson Swarm sounds like the name of an aggressive cleaning machine.

It's 2071. James Dyson, now 124 and in better health than ever, thanks to the AI-fuelled nanorobotic revolution, has just lost control of the last of the company's Dyson Swarms. What started as a fleet of cleaning-nanites, a dirt and dust-eating squadron-for-hire, has gone rogue; all of Earth's organic matter is now on the menu. People still haven't forgiven him about Brexit.

I do find it kind of funny that the Dyson company sold a vacuum cleaner called the "Dyson ball".

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#85

Post by ecshafer »

noduerme wrote: post #50
kubb wrote: post #44

Human appetite for more knows no bounds. Imagine what we’d have to do for everyone to have a zettaflop. We won’t have the resources for it. So guys like this one are in competition with normal people who just need a little bit of compute, so that he can feel powerful with a million Claudes. Sad.

For one thing, most news websites would have to load at least 10,000x as much useless javascript to achieve the same performance.

Soon every website will have an LLM entirely in JS that will create the React code for the rest of the website, build it, deploy it, then create the article on the fly from a prompt, and present it.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#86

Post by markisus »

mysecretaccount wrote: post #36

Fun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example: > One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one. We…

Don’t get hung up on the Claude part. We already know an algorithm that produces AGI: evolution. We don’t have the compute to run this algorithm because it requires simulating the whole Earth. But with enough compute, it becomes possible.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#87

Post by throw0101d »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #83
throw0101d wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available. For the record, 44TB drives have been announced in March 2026: * https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/stories/articles/seagate-deliv...

SSDs have outclassed hard drives in density for a while now. Kioxia claims their LC9 is over 245TB in capacity, announced July 2025.

How much does one 245T LC9 cost, and much much do (245T÷44T=5.5=) six Seagates cost?

I have a bunch of NVMe enclosures that generate 750W of heat when going full blast, and 600W when completely idle. How heat does the equivalent number of HDDs generate when working/idle?

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#88

Post by jpadkins »

kombine wrote: post #45
kubb wrote: post #44

Human appetite for more knows no bounds. Imagine what we’d have to do for everyone to have a zettaflop. We won’t have the resources for it. So guys like this one are in competition with normal people who just need a little bit of compute, so that he can feel powerful with a million Claudes. Sad.

Poor mother Earth, this race is unsustainable. In order to satiate guys like geohot we are pillaging the natural resources, destroying ecosystems, fucking up the climate.

why do you think we are stuck on Earth?

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#89

Post by saltcured »

eru wrote: post #38
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtualization has pushed back the need for a while, but we are going to have to look at pointers larger than 64 bit at some point. It's also not just about the raw size of datasets, but how we get a lot of utility out of various memory mapping tricks, so we consume more address space than the strict minimum required by the dataset. Also if we move up to 128 bit a lot more security mitigations become possible.

Please keep in mind that doubling isn't the only option. There's lots of numbers between 64 and 128.

Well, not so many if you assume some access alignment requirement for high-performance hardware designs...

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#90

Post by throwaway198846 »

throwaway198846 wrote: post #54
kubb wrote: post #44

Human appetite for more knows no bounds. Imagine what we’d have to do for everyone to have a zettaflop. We won’t have the resources for it. So guys like this one are in competition with normal people who just need a little bit of compute, so that he can feel powerful with a million Claudes. Sad.

I kind of agree with you there is only enough area for solar for 150 million people (even if we assume all land is solarable) but there is no reasons we couldn't eventually have everyone with a milion Claudes with fusion. Edit: There is a problem with that - 10MW * 8 billion is something like half the solar power from the sun which implies wasted heat will heat earth considerably.

Sometimes I really don't get why my comment is downvoted.
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