Top all-time · #2786
Extropic
Company blog · extropic.ai/writinghardwareaiscience
Extropic is the company blog at extropic.ai, writing about hardware, ai and science. Since 2023, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Extropic Z1T”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Extropic's writing as the primary source on its thermodynamic computing hardware, including the TSU design, the XTR-0 prototype and its litepaper. Comments mostly cite it for what the company is building.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Building thermodynamic computing hardware that is radically more energy efficient than GPUs.
Most-linked posts?
- Extropic Z1T4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-09-04
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-05
- Thermodynamic Computing from Zero to One3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-10-29
- What Extropic is building3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-11
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-24
- TSU 101 an New Type of Computing Hardware2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-29
- /writing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-29
- Extropic claims its new AI chip (TSU) is 10,000x more energy-efficient than GPUs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-29
What Hacker News says?
Is this what Extropic ( https://www.extropic.ai/ ) is aiming to commercialize and bring to market?
Comment linking /
on “Sandia turns on brain-like storage-free supercomputer”Submitted What Extropic is building as a story · 185 points
HN discussionFrom my understanding, this is exactly what https://extropic.ai is working on, and I wouldn't be surprised if https://normalcomputing.ai/ (authors of the paper) is as well.
Comment linking /
on “Thermodynamic Natural Gradient Descent”Submitted Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware as a story · 172 points
HN discussionI know they mainly present results on deep learning/neural network training and optimization, but I wonder how easy it would be to use the same optimization framework for other classes of hard or large optimization problems. I was also curious about this when I saw posts about Extropic ( https://www.extropic.ai/ ) stuff for the first time. I tried looking into any public info on their website about APIs or software…
Comment linking /
on “Thermodynamic Natural Gradient Descent”Submitted Thermodynamic Computing from Zero to One as a story · 17 points
HN discussionActually it's not. Here's some stuff to read to get a clearer picture! https://extropic.ai/writing
Comment linking /writing
on “Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware”Submitted Extropic Z1T as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis one just released a prototype platform, "XTR-0", so if it's a fraud the jig will shortly be up. https://extropic.ai/writing/inside-x0-and-xtr-0
Comment linking /writing/inside-x0-and-xtr-0
on “Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware”Submitted TSU 101 an New Type of Computing Hardware as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis seems to be the page that describes the low level details of what the hardware aims to do. https://extropic.ai/writing/tsu-101-an-entirely-new-type-of-... To me, the biggest limitation is that you’d need an entirely new stack to support a new paradigm. It doesn’t seem compatible with using existing pretrained models. There’s plenty of ways to have much more efficient paradigms of computation, but it’ll be a lon…
Comment linking /writing/tsu-101-an-entirely-new-type-of-computing-hardware
on “Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware”Submitted Z1T: Sparse Transformer‑Like Models for Probabilistic Hardware as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you want to understand exactly what we are building, read our blogs and then our paper https://extropic.ai/writing https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23972
Comment linking /writing
on “Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware”Submitted Extropic claims its new AI chip (TSU) is 10,000x more energy-efficient than GPUs as a story · 3 points
HN discussioninteresting point. i know of at least one startup working with that concept[1]. Im sure there are others. 1 - https://www.extropic.ai/
Comment linking /
on “Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom”Submitted Transformer-Like Models for Z1 as a story · 2 points
HN discussiondoes Guillaume Verdon from https://www.extropic.ai/ have thoughts on on cerebras? (or other people that read the litepaper https://www.extropic.ai/future )
Comment linking /future
on “Cerebras systems raises $1.1B Series G”Submitted Z1T: Sparse Transformer‑Like Models for Probabilistic Hardware as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.extropic.ai/future
Comment linking /future
on “Jan Leike joins Anthropic on their superalignment team”Submitted Thermodynamic Computing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wonder how this compares to thermal wells? https://extropic.ai They seem to work in a similar way, sampling from chaotic datasets to find the lowest energy state. Is one fundamentally more scalable? More efficient?
Comment linking /
on “A Eureka machine that thinks like nature and explores what AI cannot”Submitted Thermodynamic Computing from Zero to One as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> In their research, the ONISQ team focused on Rydberg qubits – a type of physical, non-logical qubits. Through this effort, they successfully developed techniques to create error-correcting logical qubits from these “noisy” Rydberg qubits. - are these "noisy" in so far as they are only able to approximate absolute zero? At theoretical absolute zero, would there be zero noise? This sounds like a big opportunity for…
Comment linking /
on “DARPA Research Develops World First Logical Qubit Circuit”Submitted Torx, Thermalizers, and Z1 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Extropic is Rethinking Computing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Extropic announces it's $14.1M Seed round as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
