91–100 of 149 posts
My prediction is that they will raise a nine-figure sum over the next decade, and never release a product that comes close to the performance of an NVIDIA card today.
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.
Is this sarcasm? (Genuinely can't tell.) And also, are you the real Eliezer?
"Extropy" is a term that was previously coined by a group of fairly nice people to describe themselves, and so far as I know is being stolen here without permission.
Hard time believing this is legit given how much time the CEO spends goofing around on social media. If it were possible to short startups, this would be a top candidate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Lex's podcast/interview with Guillaume Verdon, one of said founders. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEEbKJoNbU&pp=ygUVbGV4IGZyaWR...
Anyone else get super creepy vibes from the way he talks in this video? I'm calling that it's a fraud. If it is a fraud, how do people like this get funded?? (And how can I be creepier so that my real ideas get funded)
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Convolutional neural networks were a huge advancement in their time
I don't disagree. I just come away from the article feeling more confused as opposed to enlightened and excited about what they're building. It even makes me think that they don't understand what they're talking about which is why they're using complicated terminology to mask it but I'm hopeful I'm wrong and this is an engineering innovation that benefits everyone.
There may or may not be something there, but the article is mostly buzzword-slinging. They wrote "This will allow us to put an Extropic accelerator in every home, enabling everyone to partake in the thermodynamic AI acceleration." Huh?
If they said something like "We are trying to cut the cost of stable diffusion by a factor of 100", that would sort of make sense. But then people would want to see a demo.
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…
Skimmed the litepaper. Has the flavor of: you can do "simulated" annealing by literally annealing. I like the idea of using raw physics as a "hardware" accelerator, i.e. analog computing. fwiw, quantum computing can be seen as a form of analog computing. 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.
We experimented with doing ML training with it, but it's not clear that it trains any better than a non-broken PRNG. It might be fun to feed the output into stable diffusion and see how cool the pictures are, though.
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Anyone else get super creepy vibes from the way he talks in this video? I'm calling that it's a fraud. If it is a fraud, how do people like this get funded?? (And how can I be creepier so that my real ideas get funded)
He gets lots of interesting guests (and some BSers) on his podcast, so people listen.
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.
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…
> Extropic is also building semiconductor devices that operate at room temperature to extend our reach to a larger market. These devices trade the Josephson junction for the transistor. Doing so sacrifices some energy efficiency compared to superconducting devices. In exchange, it allows one to build them using standard manufacturing processes and supply chains, unlocking massive scale.
So, their mass-market device is going to be based on transistors.
The actual article read like a weird mesh of techno-babble and startup-evangelism to me. I can't judge if what they are suggesting is vaporware or hyperbole. This is one of those cases where they are either way ahead of my own thinking or they are trying to bamboozle me with jargon.
I personally find it hard to categorize a lot of AI hype into "worth actually looking into" vs. "total waste of time". The best I can do in this case is suspend my judgement and if they come up again with something more substantive than a rambling post then I can always readjust.