It's not just a "hardware RNG". An RNG outputs a uniform distribution. This hardware outputs randomness with controllable distributions, potentially extremely complex ones, many orders of magnitude more efficiently than doing it the traditional way with ALUs. The class of problems that can be solved by sampling from extremely complex probability distributions is much larger than you might naively expect.

I was skeptical of Extropic from the start, but what they've shown here exceeded my low expectations. They've made real hardware which is novel and potentially useful in the future after a lot more R&D. Analog computing implemented in existing CMOS processes that can run AI more efficiently by four orders of magnitude would certainly be revolutionary. That final outcome seems far enough away that this should probably still be the domain of university research labs rather than a venture-backed startup, but I still applaud the effort and wish them luck.