"Extropic, a startup developing an exotic new kind of computer chip that handles probabilistic bits, has produced its first working hardware along with proof that more advanced systems can tackle useful tasks in artificial intelligence and scientific research. The startup's chips work in a fundamentally different way than chips from Nvidia, AMD, and others, and they promise to be thousands of times more energy-efficient when scaled up."
"Extropic calls its processors thermodynamic sampling units, or TSUs, as opposed to central processing units (CPUs) or graphics processing units (GPUs). TSUs use silicon components to harness thermodynamic electron fluctuations, shaping them to model probabilities of various complex systems, such as the weather, or AI models capable of generating images, text, or videos. The first working Extropic chip has now been shared with a handful of partners, including frontier AI labs, startups working on weather modeling, and representatives from several governments."
""This allows all sorts of developers to kick the tires," says Extropic CEO Guillaume Verdon, who gained notoriety within the tech world as a colorful and sometimes controversial online persona called Based Beff Jezos and a new techno philosophy known as effective accelerationism or e/acc before founding the startup. Verdon and his cofounder, Trevor McCourt, who is Extropic's CTO, previously worked on quantum computing at Google before pursuing their novel computing approach."
Extropic produced a first working thermodynamic sampling unit (TSU) chip and demonstrated that scaled TSU systems can handle AI and scientific tasks. TSUs harness thermodynamic electron fluctuations in silicon to represent probabilistic bits and to model probabilities for complex systems such as weather and generative AI. The architecture differs fundamentally from CPUs and GPUs and promises thousands-fold improvements in energy efficiency when scaled. The initial chip has been shared with selected partners including frontier AI labs, weather-modeling startups, and government representatives. Founders and technical leadership previously worked on quantum computing at Google.
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