The cool thing about Silicon Valley is serious people try stuff that may seem wild and unlikely and in the off chance it works, entire humanity benefits. This looks like Atomic Semi, Joby Aviation, maybe even OpenAI in its early days.
The bad thing about Silicon Valley is charlatans abuse this openness and friendly spirit, and swindle investors of millions with pipe dreams and worthless technology. I think the second is inevitable as Silicon Valley becomes more famous, more high status without a strong gatekeeping mechanism which is also anathema to its open ethos. Unfortunately this company is firmly in the second category. A performative startup, “changing the world” to satisfy the neurosis of its founders who desperately want to be seen as someone taking risks to change the world. In reality it will change nothing, and go die into the dustbins of history. I hope he enjoys his 15 minutes of fame.
What makes you so sure that extropic is the second and not the first?
Fundamentally, gut feels by following the founder on Twitter. But if I had to explain, I don’t understand the point of speeding up or getting true RnG, even for diffusion models this is not a big bottleneck, so it sounds more like a buzzword than actual practical technology.
Having a TRNG is easy, you just reverse bias a zener diode or any number of other strategies that rely on physics for noise. Hype is a strategy they're clearly taking, but people in this thread are so dismissive (and I get why, extropic has been vague posting for years and makes it sound like vaporware) but what does everything think they're actually doing with the money? It's not a better dice roller...
What is it if not a better dice roller though? Isn't that what they are claiming it is? And also that this better dice rolling is very important (and I admittedly am not someone who can evaluate this)
Yes, I think they claim they are a far better dice roller in randomness and speed and that this is very important. The first might be true, but I don’t see why second is in any way true. These all need to be true for this company to make sense :
1. They build a chip that does random sampling far better than any GPU (is this even proven yet?)
2. They use a model architecture that utilizes this sampling advantage which means most of the computation must be concentrated at sampling. This might be true for energy based models or some future architecture we have no idea about. AFAIK, this is not even true for diffusion.
3. This model architecture must outcompete autoregressive models in economically useful tasks, whether language modeling or robotics etc, right now auto regressive transformers is still king across all tasks.
And then their chip will be bought by hyper scalers and their company will become successful. There is just so many if’s outside of them building their core technology that this whole project makes no sense. And you can say that this is true for all startups, I don’t think that’s the case, this is just ridiculous.
thats is the main reason i don't trust extropic.