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shotoday at 5:16 AM1 replyview on HN

If folding@home is a useful yardstick by which we might estimate the amount of GPU-ish capability that civilians might be coaxed into donating to a shared enterprise, yeah, it doesn't look pretty. This is extremely rough napkin math but comparing to xAI's Collosus 2 for example, for training workflows you're probably looking at 4-5 orders of magnitude the capability of all of folding@home combined. That's 100,000 times faster.

Very rough math like I said but I doubt it's directionally wrong.

And even if you did force literally everyone on earth with some sort of GPU to max it out 24/7 in service of an open source AI training enterprise - you would waste so much power trying to use that inefficient consumer hardware with the worst latency imaginable that it would be cheaper and faster to get everyone to instead chip in some cash to buy a datacenter with blackwell chips instead! So the idea has no legs whatsoever.


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WithinReasontoday at 8:06 AM

folding@home reached 2.43 exaflops by April 12, 2020, which would make it the largest supercomputer on the planet.

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