6 ms·
Will I ever own a zettaflop?
- androiddrew 7mo agoNot with the price of silicon being what it is
- supermdguy 7mo agoIf all LLM advancements stopped today, but compute + energy got to the price where the $30 million zettaflop was possible, I wonder what outcomes would be possible? Would 1000 claudes be able to coordinate in meaningful ways? How much human intervention would be needed?
- echelon 7mo agoThere's no way we're not living in a historical simulation. This is all just such crazy coincidence. Everything is coming together so quickly.
- trhway 7mo agolook at the history of technology, and before that to the biological history - how long it took from single cells to multi-cells vs. for example how long it took from lizard brain to human brain - the things are naturally going exponential (my thinking why - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9418811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9418811) at least until they hit some wall, yet so far hitting walls mostly only stimulated even more advanced development. There is an issue of the "non-uniformity of the spread of the future" though with fast development, and the faster the development the stronger the non-uniformity and the tensions it creates. Strong non-uniformity and resulting tensions have tendency to resolve catastrophically on their own at some point if not solved/smoothed by the other ways before.
- ks2048 7mo agoWhat's a "a historical simulation" and why is it all such a coincidence? The "simulation argument" to me is ridiculous.
- echelon 7mo agoWe don't know if life is rare, but intelligence seems rare given our sky surveys to date. Life started on earth shortly after the solar system formed. It's a quarter the age of the universe that it took for intelligence and civilization to arise. A long, long, looooong time. From a numbers perspective, our minds are all shockingly rare. The universe probably doesn't produce many of us through stellar and then biological evolution. Taking that into consideration, contrast that with the flip side. If high technological simulation exists that becomes indistinguishable from reality, it could simulate quintillions of minds. It seems like we're on the path to that technology, with a great degree of probability. Given that, and the fact that historical simulation is likely easy for the future, it seems more probable to me that we're one of the quintillions of simulations rather than the origin timeline. I'm half joking, but I'm half not. It's a fun thought experiment with absolutely no basis in science. Do you even really know if you were alive a second ago? Perhaps you were just instanced into existence with a set of memories - memories you are not randomly accessing. A very deliberate version of a Boltzmann Brain. Again, pseudoscientific tomfoolery, but fun to ponder.
- defrost 7mo ago> but intelligence seems rare given our sky surveys to date. Most of the universe, by a large percentage (or so I'm told), is further away than 200 light years. What signs of intelligence would we see or detect in our own solar system from a distance of 200 light years should we scan it with all our latest and best tech?
- echelon 7mo agoDavid Kipping has given several lectures in which he proposes that life on Earth may be the only life in the observable universe. It's kind of fascinating to ponder, though he holds that the true scientist states we have no evidence either way. It's strange that life has existed on earth for much of the age of the solar system itself, yet intelligence only arises at the end of the habitable period of earth. There's not much time left.
- Dylan16807 7mo agoFor the "coincidence" part: While technology has been advancing very fast, the human population also ballooned alongside that advancement, so the odds of any particular intelligent Earthling being born in such an era of growth are pretty high.
- throw0101d 7mo agoSomewhat related, why the creators of Zettabyte File System (ZFS) decided to make it 128 bits (writing in 2004): > Some customers already have datasets on the order of a petabyte, or 2^50 bytes. Thus the 64-bit capacity limit of 2^64 bytes is only 14 doublings away. Moore's Law for storage predicts that capacity will continue to double every 9-12 months, which means we'll start to hit the 64-bit limit in about a decade. Storage systems tend to live for several decades, so it would be foolish to create a new one without anticipating the needs that will surely arise within its projected lifetime. * https://web.archive.org/web/20061112032835/http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you https://web.archive.org/web/20061112032835/http://blogs.sun.... And some math on what that means 'physically': > Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 10^51 operations per second on at most 10^31 bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully-populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2^128 blocks = 2^137 bytes = 2^140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2^140 bits) / (10^31 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg. > To operate at the 10^31 bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc^2, the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2x10^28 J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4x10^21 kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celcius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4x10^6 J/kg 1.4x10^21 kg = 3.4x10^27 J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.* * Ibid.
- popol12 7mo agoVery interesting, could someone please do the same computation for filling 64 bit storage?
- Dylan16807 7mo agoYou want someone to put "3.4*10^27 / 2^64" into a calculator? 200 million joules, using all the same assumptions. 50kWh. Though that leaves the question of how the energy requirements change when we're not going for extreme density (half a nanogram??). If we instead consider a million 18TB hard drives, and estimate they each need 8 watts for 20 hours to fill up, 2^64 bytes take 160MWh to write on modern hardware. And they'll weigh 700 tons. Edit: The quote is inconsistent about whether it wants to talk about bytes or blocks, so add or subtract a factor of about a thousand depending on what you want.
- jmyeet 7mo agoI'm a big believer that humanity's future is in space in a Dyson Swarm. There are simply too many advantages. It's estimated that humanity currently uses ~10^11 Watts of power. About 10^16 Watts of solar energy hits the Earth but the Earth's cross-section is less than a billionth of the Sun's total energy output. A Dyson Swarm would give us access to ~10^25 Watts of power. With our current population that would give every person on Earth living space about equivalent to Africa and access to more energy than our entire civilization currently uses by orders of magnitude. I bring this up to present an alternate view of the future that a lot of thought has gone into: the Matrioshka Brain. This is basically a Dyson Swarm but the entire thing operates as one giant computer. Some of the heat from inner layers is captured by outer layers for greater efficiency. That's the Matrioshka part. How much computing power would this be? It's hard to say but estimates range from 10^40 to 10^50 FLOPS (eg [1]). At 10^45 FLOPS that would give each person on Earth access to roughly 100 trillion zettaflops. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1nzbhxj/matrioshka_brain_calculator/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1nzbhxj/matrio...
- voidUpdate 7mo agoIf we absorb all of the sun's energy using a dyson swarm, the earth is going to get very cold and dark
- ninkendo 7mo agoIt makes me wonder about what it would take to actually create one. You’d need self-replicating machines to build it, naturally. You’d need some ability for them to mine from asteroids and process the materials right there on the spot. And they’d need to be able to build both the processor “swarmlets” (probably some stamped-out solar/engine/CPU package) and more builders, so that the growth can be exponential. Oh, and the ability to turn solar energy into thrust somehow using only fuel you can get from the mined asteroids. Maybe a prerequisite is finding a solar system that has a huge and extremely uranium-rich asteroid belt. You would need a CPU design that can be built using the kind of fidelity that a self-replicating machine in space under constant solar radiation can achieve. But if you can get the scale high enough, maybe you can just brute force it and make machines on the computational scale of a Pentium 3, but there’s 10^40 of them so who cares. Maybe there’s a novel way of designing a durable computing machine out of hydrocarbons we have yet to discover. The machines would have to self replicate, and you’d need to store the instructions somewhere hardened. And that can be built out of materials commonly found in asteroids. Maybe hydrocarbons. Hell, may as well use RNA. These things need to be as good as humans at building stuff, so really this is just creating artificial “life” that self has DNA and is made of cells that build proteins needed to create the machine. Maybe they reproduce by spreading as little DNA seeds that can attach to an asteroid with the right chemistry, and we just spew them into the cosmos at a candidate star and hope the process gets kickstarted. Hell, we could make it spew its own DNA at the next stars over as soon as it’s done. We’d have a whole galaxy computing for us, all we’d need is the right DNA instructions, the right capsule for them, and a way to launch them. Maybe another civilization has already done this…
- JackYoustra 7mo agonit: it's a zettaflops, not a zettaflop
- nl 7mo agoFirstly, True Names is an awesome read, and the real origin of cyberpunk. I much prefer it to Neuromancer or Diamond Age. Secondly, I recently tried to work out what year on the Top500 list[1] I could reasonably be for around US$5000. It's surprisingly difficult to work out mostly because they use 64 bit flops and few other systems quote that number. [1] https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/11/ https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/11/
- eru 7mo agoIsn't the Diamond Age something like post-cyberpunk already? It came out three years after Snow Crash, which already ironically referenced "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel". I agree that Neuromancer wasn't a great novel, though it obviously had vibes that resonated with many people. The novel being otherwise a bit of a dud actually speaks to how strong the vibes were to overcome that.
- ehnto 7mo agoI feel that's a bit uncharitable, it wasn't just vibes, it was imaginative world building, with some truly interesting and novel concepts tied into a decent enough story to enjoy the world within. As with much from this thread of cyberpunk writing, the cities and world are the most important characters, and the storyline is just an excuse to wander through their streets.
- eru 7mo ago'Vibes' was probably the wrong word. I agree with you. Though about the world building: he threw out a lot of neologisms on the page, and later other writers gave them meaning.
- ehnto 7mo agoThat's true, I read Neuromancer pretty late, already well primed on the terms of art which smoothed that over a bit. But a lot was left to the imagination.
- arthurjj 7mo agoI just want to thank the submitter. This is the type of internet that I really miss. A very smart person who's a good writer, proud of their interests and obsessions.
- ipnon 7mo agoYes, to paraphrase Jobs, I'm only interested in the intersection of Technology Avenue and Liberal Arts Street.
- ks2048 7mo agoI disagree. Comes off as an arrogant guy rather than a curious scientist. What will it take to get this before you die? What are physical limitations to shrink things more and more and to speed things up more and more? He talks about solar, but what are the physical limits and how can we get there? I think there's interesting physics here, but this sounds like just a rich guy craving more power.
- danpalmer 7mo agoGeohot is famous for not being as smart as he makes out. Famously said he'd go to Twitter when Musk bought it and help Musk fix search, because "how hard can it be". Then left in shame 3 months later having achieved nothing except figuring out that It's A Bit More Complicated Than That(tm). Comma does some cool stuff, if relatively entry-level, and this post is good napkin-maths and was a fun read, but there is so much more depth and a hundred ways in which this post is wrong or over-simplified to the point of near irrelevance.
- petesergeant 7mo ago> Geohot is famous for not being as smart as he makes out That someone isn't as intelligent as they think they are doesn't place an upper bound on their intelligence.
- danpalmer 7mo agoThat someone thinks they can personally "fix search" in a few months at a multi-billion dollar social network that just fired half its engineering staff, however, does.
- Sprotch 7mo agoAnd when it comes, people will use it for porn, memes, and to argue with each other in bad faith
- mememememememo 7mo agoPeople?
- etothepii 7mo agoSome people.
- mememememememo 7mo agoSaw zetaflop in the title. Knew it would be that guy!
- mysecretaccount 7mo agoFun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example: > One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one. We are already near the limits of what we can do if we throw compute at Claude without improving the underlying models, and it is not clear how we can get big improvements on the underlying models at this point. Surely geohot knows this, so I am surprised he thinks that "one million Claudes" would be able to e.g. write a better novel than one hundred Claudes, or even one Claude.
- emaadm 7mo ago> We are already near the limits of what we can do Hard disagree. If I had a million Claudes worth of compute I'd be livestreaming my entire reality feed to a local server 24/7 and having it organize my observations and thoughts, synthesize new ideas, implement prototypes and discard infeasible ones while I sleep. If you're in the business of knowledge creation, a million Claudes isn't enough. Text is an easy modality, I want foundation models that operate on text, images, audio, video, streaming point clouds, ...
- mysecretaccount 7mo agoUsing a single Claude agent, ask it to generate "new" ideas and it will generate an immense list. Ask it to rank those ideas by novelty and it will comply. The results will be lackluster. Additional agents will not improve the result.
- anentropic 7mo agoI doubt you create that much knowledge
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo agoI call this the Laurie Anderson fallacy, from a line in one of her songs: > "Heaven is exactly like where you are right now, but much, much better." If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine - in the same way that Alan Turing imagined machines learning from experience, but didn't imagine downstream products like Sora, ad tech, or social media, or their cultural and economic effects.
- latentframe 7mo agoMaybe the bottleneck is shifting from compute to energy and capital ; at some point it stops being a software problem and starts looking like infrastructure power land cooling... Just feels like the constraint is moving down the stack
- kubb 7mo agoHuman appetite for more knows no bounds. Imagine what we’d have to do for everyone to have a zettaflop. We won’t have the resources for it. So guys like this one are in competition with normal people who just need a little bit of compute, so that he can feel powerful with a million Claudes. Sad.
- kombine 7mo agoPoor mother Earth, this race is unsustainable. In order to satiate guys like geohot we are pillaging the natural resources, destroying ecosystems, fucking up the climate.
- ramon156 7mo agoI think i know two or three other people who are much, much more to blame... putting it on one dude is weird.
- kombine 7mo agoI apologise for not being very clear, it's on all of us - including myself.
- chuzz 7mo agowho's talking about owning a zettaflop on earth? The second part of sustainable growth is growth after all
- jpadkins 7mo agowhy do you think we are stuck on Earth?
- noduerme 7mo agoFor one thing, most news websites would have to load at least 10,000x as much useless javascript to achieve the same performance.
- shmeeed 7mo ago
- svantana 7mo agoHedonic treadmill. Once he's approaching that zettaflops, he'll want a yottaflops.
- randomtoast 7mo agoThere are two ways to be unhappy. Not getting what you want and getting what you want.
- cushychicken 7mo agogeohot definitely ticks the box for “so ambitious he occasionally sounds unhinged”.
- throw0101d 7mo agoA need was felt to add ronna— and quetta— prefixes in 2022: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix In 2025 we got robi— and quebi—: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
- xg15 7mo agoAs a Tolkien enjoyer, I'll wait for the quenyaflops.
- Havoc 7mo agoFun hypothetical I’d say there odd a bit of a flaw in the read 50,000 books part though. The LLM reading that much doesn’t really get you 50k books of value as a person. You’re the bottleneck not the flops
- attentive 7mo agobetter question - will zettaflop ever own me?