Will I ever own a zettaflop?

Firstly, 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/

Somewhat 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....

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.

I 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.

If 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?

And when it comes, people will use it for porn, memes, and to argue with each other in bad faith

nit: it's a zettaflops, not a zettaflop

Not with the price of silicon being what it is

I'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/matrio...

There's no way we're not living in a historical simulation.

This is all just such crazy coincidence.

Everything is coming together so quickly.