It’s been a weekend. My wife pulled a double-shift last night, and I took advantage of the boring silence in the house to wrap up the preparations for my last week of classes, and was up way too late. For my history of evolutionary thought class, I have the laziest plan ever: the students are doing presentations all week, and are also responsible for evaluating their peers. For my intro class, I’ve got one last lecture all queued up and ready to go, and then on Thursday they get an exam. But right now, I’m really tired and should get some sleep tonight.
Now for some light entertainment. A company called Extropic is getting millions of dollars of funding on the basis of this kind of gobbledygook.
Extropic describes itself as building a
computing paradigm which harnesses the power of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics to fundamentally merge generative AI with the physics of the world.[Extropic, 2023]
There you go. Translate, please.
I’m no physicist, but even I can see that that’s a lot of noise — they’ve garbled up a few thermodynamics buzzwords and mixed them up with the magic word “AI”. Helpfully, they go further to try and explain.
And the hardware wants to be stochastic, if we want to keep scaling. So why don’t we just cut the Gordian knot and simplify things, and implement AI algorithms in, as the stochastic physics of the world. So what we’re building at Extropic is a full stack, Physics-based computing paradigm focused on AI. And we harness the stochastic physics of electrons directly in order to instantiate probabilistic machine learning, which is the parent concept to generative AI.
Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I’m just a lowly biologist. Maybe I’d just like to know how someone can con millions of dollars out of silicon valley venture capitalists with that kind of insipid, pretentious babble. Are VCs just not very bright?
All it needs is some goofy AI-generated ‘art’ to make it look like sci-fi…and look, the gullible tech press provides!
He who instantiates probabilistic machine learning rules the entire compost!
I don’t think I’ll ever be silly enough to spout this sort of rubbish for money. This is from their own website, extropic.ai:
Extropic assembles itself from the future
[Incoming transmission from the future]
The era of omnipresent generative AI is imminent.
Timelines have been accelerated.
The future must come to pass.
Extropic is building the ultimate substrate for generative AI in the physical world.
Building an AI supercomputer by harnessing the first principles of thermodynamics and information, like an alien would.
With this fundraising announcement, Extropic crosses a significant checkpoint in the timeline.
A milestone in wielding the techno-capital machine to birth a core technology for our civilizational trajectory.
The Extropic AI supercomputer thus begins assembling itself from the future.
[End of transmission]
After that there’s introductions of their executive team, then this bit about where their money is coming from:
Our backers
We are excited to announce our Series Seed round totaling $14.1M, led by Steve Jang and Kindred Ventures (Uber, Coinbase, Humane), with participation from Buckley Ventures (Rippling, Figma, Vercel, Mercury), HOF Capital, Julian Capital, Marque VC, OSS Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Weekend Fund, and several others.
Amongst its angel investors, we are excited to have Aidan Gomez (Cohere), Amjad Masad (Replit) Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox), Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Balaji Srinivasan (Coinbase), Bryan Johnson, Chris Prucha (Notion), Farbood Nivi, Garry Tan (YC), Ivan Zhang (Cohere), Naval Ravikant, Oliver Cameron (Voyage), Packy McCormick, Scott Belsky (Adobe), Tobias Lutke (Shopify), and many more on board.
We are grateful to have such a broad base of investors committed to advancing the frontiers of computing. We look forward to accelerating the advent of our computational paradigm with this Seed capital.
One more thing…
The future is nearer than it may appear… The Extropic hardware self-assembly process has already begun:
…followed by nothing more than their crappy logo, where the name isn’t even properly aligned.
I’m guessing these are among the techbros who support Donold Trump. Either way, their actions say a lot about AMerica’s techbro-capitalist class…
Also, these technowankers seem to be associated with the so-called “effective accelerationism” movement, described here: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/effective-accelerationism-movement-doesnt-care-013934150.html
“Rather than fear, we have faith in the adaptation process and wish to accelerate this to the asymptotic limit: the technocapital singularity,” the site reads…
Well, we sure as hell wouldn’t want a technoSOCIALIST singularity, would we? Heaven forefend!
[due diligence]
https://www.extropic.ai/accelerate
[Dec 4th, 2023 / Announcement]
Old news.
I declare Extropic ISO 9000 buzzword compliant.
And yes, this news is about a year old now. So far I’m not seeing any more recent news about this. Which means both they haven’t got any results, and no one’s yet publicly asking where their “seed fund” is going.
Recent news? Depends.
Recent opinion, well, this post, and other things when I peek..
e.g. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/12/01/does-ai-startup-extropic-actually-do-anything/
So their business model relies on leveraging the stochastic properties of electrons to accomplish practically the same thing as a pseudorandom number generator, only at some orders of magbitude greater cost?
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
@8 drsteve is very close.
I am also just a lowly biologist, but I think
means they are building a random number generator based on stray voltages.
Thanks, John, I didn’t see the date on that one. And that article confirms my suspicion: they haven’t done much of anything, and their backers haven’t asked any questions yet.