[HN Gopher] Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware
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Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware
Author : vyrotek
Score : 78 points
Date : 2025-10-29 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (extropic.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (extropic.ai)
| quantumHazer wrote:
| there is also Normal Computing[0] that are trying different
| approaches to chips like that. Anyway these are very difficult
| problems and Extropic already abandoned some of their initial
| claims about superconductors to pivot to more classical CMOS
| circuits[1]
|
| [0]: https://www.normalcomputing.com
|
| [1]: https://www.zach.be/p/making-unconventional-computing-
| practi...
| nfw2 wrote:
| I don't really understand the purpose of hyping up a launch
| announcement and then not making any effort whatsoever to make
| the progress comprehensible to anyone without advanced expertise
| in the field.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| That's the intention. Fill it up with enough jargon and
| gobbledegook that it looks impressive to investors, while
| hiding the fact that there's no real technology underneath.
| frozenseven wrote:
| >jargon and gobbledegook
|
| >no real technology underneath
|
| They're literally shipping real hardware. They also put out a
| paper + posted their code too.
|
| Flippant insults will not cut it.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Nice try. It's smoke and mirrors. Tell me one thing it does
| better than a 20 year old CPU.
| frozenseven wrote:
| More insults and a blanket refusal to engage with the
| material. Ok.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| If you think comparing hardware performance is an insult,
| then you have some emotional issues or are a troll.
| frozenseven wrote:
| Ah, more insults. This will be my final reply to you.
|
| I'll say it again. The hardware exists. The paper and
| code are there. If someone wants to insist that it's fake
| or whatever, they need to come up with something better
| than permutations of "u r stoopid" (your response to
| their paper:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45753471). Just
| engage with the actual material. If there's a solid
| criticism, I'd like to hear it too.
| maradan wrote:
| This hardware is an analog simulator for Gibbs sampling,
| which is an idealized physical process that describes
| random systems with large scale structure. The energy
| efficient gains come from the fact that it's analog. It
| may seem like jargon, but Gibbs sampling is an extremely
| well known concept with decades of work with connections
| to many areas of statistics, probability theory, and
| machine learning. The algorithmic problem they need to
| solve is how to harness Gibbs sampling for large scale ML
| tasks, but arguably this isn't really a huge leap, it's
| very similar to EBM learning/sampling but with the
| advantage of being able to sample larger systems for the
| same energy.
| maradan wrote:
| "no really technology underneath" zzzzzzzzzzz
| fastball wrote:
| You not comprehending a technology does not automatically
| make it vaporware.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| What's not comprehensible?
|
| It's just miniaturized lava lamps.
| nfw2 wrote:
| A lava lamps that just produces randomness, ie for cryptology
| purposes, is different than the benefit here, which is to
| produce specific randomness at low energy-cost
| d_silin wrote:
| It is a hardware RNG they are building. The claim is that their
| solution is going to be more computationally efficient for a
| narrow class of problems (de-noising step for diffusion AI
| models) vs current state of the art. Maybe.
|
| This is what they are trying to create, more specifically:
|
| https://pubs.aip.org/aip/apl/article/119/15/150503/40486/Pro...
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| An old concept indeed! I think about this Ed Fredkin story a
| lot... In his words:
|
| "Just a funny story about random numbers: in the early days of
| computers people wanted to have random numbers for Monte Carlo
| simulations and stuff like that and so a great big wonderful
| computer was being designed at MIT's Lincoln laboratory. It was
| the largest fastest computer in the world called TX2 and was to
| have every bell and whistle possible: a display screen that was
| very fancy and stuff like that. And they decided they were
| going to solve the random number problem, so they included a
| register that always yielded a random number; this was really
| done carefully with radioactive material and Geiger counters,
| and so on. And so whenever you read this register you got a
| truly random number, and they thought: "This is a great advance
| in random numbers for computers!" But the experience was
| contrary to their expectations! Which was that it turned into a
| great disaster and everyone ended up hating it: no one writing
| a program could debug it, because it never ran the same way
| twice, so ... This was a bit of an exaggeration, but as a
| result everybody decided that the random number generators of
| the traditional kind, i.e., shift register sequence generated
| type and so on, were much better. So that idea got abandoned,
| and I don't think it has ever reappeared."
|
| RIP Ed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Generating randomness is not a bottleneck and modern SIMD CPUs
| should be more than fast enough. I thought they're building
| approximate computation where a*b is computed within some error
| threshold p.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I think that's underselling it a bit, since there's lots of
| existing ways to have _A_ hardware RNG. They 're trying to use
| _lots and lots_ of hardware RNG to solve probabilistic problems
| a little more probabilisticly.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I tried this, but not with the "AI magic" angle. It turns out
| nobody cares because CSPRNGs are random enough and really
| fast.
| rvz wrote:
| This looks really amazing if not unbelieveable to the point where
| it is almost too good to be real.
|
| I have not seen benchmarks on Extropic's new computing hardware
| yet but need to know from experts who are in the field of AI
| infrastructure at the semiconductor level if this is legit.
|
| I'm 75% believing that this is real but have a 25% skepticisim
| and will reserve judgement until others have tried the hardware.
|
| So my only question for the remaining 25%:
|
| Is this a scam?
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Too good to be true, incomprehensible jargon to go along...
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I mean it sure looks like a scam.
|
| I really like the design of it though.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I doubt it's a scam. Beff might be on to something or
| completely delusional, but not actively scamming.
| vzcx wrote:
| The best conmen have an abundance confidence in themselves.
| delichon wrote:
| This one just released a prototype platform, "XTR-0", so if
| it's a fraud the jig will shortly be up.
|
| https://extropic.ai/writing/inside-x0-and-xtr-0
| natosaichek wrote:
| I think it's more a concern that the hardware isn't
| useful in the real world, rather than that the hardware
| doesn't meet the description they provide of it.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Usually there's a negative correlation between the fanciness of a
| startup webpage and the actual value/product they'll deliver.
|
| This gives "hype" vibes.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I'm more impressed that my laptop fans came on when I loaded
| the page.
|
| It's the one attached to my TV that just runs movies/YT - I
| don't recall the last time I heard the fans.
| ecshafer wrote:
| They did say thermodynamic computing.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I've been wondering how long it would take for someone to try
| probabilistic computing for AI workloads - the imprecision
| inherent in the workload makes it ideally suited for AI matrix
| math with a significant power reduction. My professor in
| university was researching this space and it seemed very
| interesting. I never thought it could supplant CPUs necessarily
| but certainly massive computer applications that don't require
| precise math like 3D rendering (and now AI) always seemed like a
| natural fit.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I don't think that it does AI matrix math with significant
| power reduction but rather it just seems to provide rng? I may
| be wrong but I don't think what you are saying is true in my
| limited knowledge, maybe someone can tell what is the reality
| of it, whether it can do Ai matrix math with significant power
| reduction or not or if its even their goal right now as to me
| currently it feels like a lava lamp equivalent* thing as some
| other commenter said
| 6510 wrote:
| I'm still waiting for my memristors.
| docandrew wrote:
| Hype aside, if you can get an answer to a computing problem with
| error bars in significantly less time, where precision just isn't
| that important (such as LLMs) this could be a game changer.
| alyxya wrote:
| Precision actually matters a decent amount in LLMs.
| Quantization is used strategically in places that'll minimize
| performance degradation, and models are smart enough so some
| loss in performance still gives a good model. I'm skeptical how
| well this would turn out, but it's probably always possible to
| remedy precision loss with a sufficiently larger model though.
| fastball wrote:
| LLMs are inherently probabilistic. Things like ReLU throw out
| a ton of data deliberately.
| alyxya wrote:
| No that isn't throwing out data. Activation functions
| perform a nonlinear transformation to increase the
| expressivity of a function. If you did two matrix
| multiplications without ReLU in between, your function
| contains less information than with a ReLU in between.
| trevor_extropic wrote:
| If you want to understand exactly what we are building, read our
| blogs and then our paper
|
| https://extropic.ai/writing https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23972
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| I was hoping the preprint would explain the mysterious ancient
| runes on the device chassis :(
| ipsum2 wrote:
| The answer is that they're cosplaying sci-fi movies, in
| attempt to woo investors.
| simonerlic wrote:
| What, is a bit of whimsy illegal?
| dmos62 wrote:
| Why are you replying under every other comment here in this
| low effort, negative manner?
| moralestapia wrote:
| Nice!
|
| This is "quantum" computing, btw.
| trevormccrt wrote:
| Actually it's not. Here's some stuff to read to get a clearer
| picture! https://extropic.ai/writing
| fidotron wrote:
| Is this the new term for analog VLSI?
|
| Or if we call it analog is it too obvious what the problems are
| going to be?
| alyxya wrote:
| This seems to be the page that describes the low level details of
| what the hardware aims to do.
| https://extropic.ai/writing/tsu-101-an-entirely-new-type-of-...
|
| To me, the biggest limitation is that you'd need an entirely new
| stack to support a new paradigm. It doesn't seem compatible with
| using existing pretrained models. There's plenty of ways to have
| much more efficient paradigms of computation, but it'll be a long
| while before any are mature enough to show substantial value.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| 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.
| nfw2 wrote:
| What makes you so sure that extropic is the second and not the
| first?
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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...
| nfw2 wrote:
| 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)
| Void_ wrote:
| This gives me Devs vibe (2020 TV Series) -
| https://www.indiewire.com/awards/industry/devs-cinematograph...
| tcdent wrote:
| Such an underrated TV show.
| arjie wrote:
| Has anyone received the dev board? What did you do with it?
| Curious what this can do.
| frozenseven wrote:
| It's finally here! Extropic has been working on this since 2022.
| I'm really excited to see how this performs in the real world.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| How should we think about how much _effective compute_ is being
| done with these devices compared to classical (GPU) computing?
| Obviously FLOPs doesn 't make sense, so what does?
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