Could someone smarter than me explain if this is a big deal or just hype? The work sound promising, but I wonder how long it would take to build and validate.
> We are very excited to finally share more about what Extropic is building: a full-stack hardware platform to harness matter's natural fluctuations as a computational resource for Generative AI.
This is New Age, dressed up with the latest fashion.
They are very energy efficient (measured in pJ/bit), but non-cryptographic PRNGs, which are typical for ML, are far more efficient.
It's not obviously wrong to think that AI algorithms will pick up bias from "overfitting" to their PRNGs used during training, but I'm not expecting the benefits to be very large.
AFAIK there are other efforts to develop analog neural network ASICs. Since neural networks are noise-tolerant this could work and could allow faster computations than conventional must-be-perfect digital circuits. IBM, Intel, and others have experimented with this.
I wouldn't believe there's anything particularly novel here unless a lot more detail or test hardware is given.
I'm not 100% sure this is true but I've heard that this fellow was involved with the NFT craze and made money there, and that sets off alarm bells. I've suspected for a while that e/acc is a marketing thing since it's just repackaging old extropian stuff from the 1990s.
"I want to believe" but have seen enough to be skeptical of extreme claims without hard evidence.
This site doesn’t get everything right. It tends to miss things that succeed in the consumer space because this is a pro audience not a mainstream audience. But it usually gets hard science right.
As far as the feasibility and impact on AI in general, I have no idea.
Someone should tell them about MCMC and alike.
Or if they want to accelerate MCMC for a particular problem, they can build a classical ASIC and scale it.
It might fail for the reasons many startups fail, but it's not prima facie fantasy.