RSA-896
53 points by madars 2 hours ago | 12 comments

madars 2 hours ago
More details: https://x.com/sweis/status/2101484464807596264

    I had Claude port CADO-NFS to run on GPUs. Then it orchestrated a fleet to run on scavenged idle capacity. It ran with a max of 2048 GPUs for about of 30 GPU-years over 10 days.
    I asked Claude if it had a message for a public: “The credit belongs first to the people who built the number field sieve and CADO-NFS over several decades, and to the teams who set the earlier records. This run used their algorithm and much of their code.”
    Also to clarify:
    - No new algorithmic factoring improvements. 
    - It’s still exponential.
    - No new threats to deployed keys.
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wslh 31 minutes ago
> It’s still exponential

It's actually subexponential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve?wpr...

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inopinatus 29 minutes ago
Ah yes, the farcaster network.
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someguydave 2 minutes ago
kinda bearish for the data center rollouts if the spare compute can be used to solve math puzzles instead of training LLMs
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tristanj 2 hours ago
If you've already paid for and reserved a whole cluster of GPUs, any idle capacity is capacity you've already paid for. Using it is effectively free. So might as well use it to solve fun math puzzles.

Though, it would make more financial sense to mine crypto.

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ehe78qhe 60 minutes ago
Only if you pay a flat rate for electricity and cooling.
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tristanj 49 minutes ago
But Anthropic isn't paying for the electricity and cooling. They don't run their own data centers, they rent compute from providers who cover those costs.

That's entirely why they can blow compute on the fun projects like this. If they had to pay extra for the electricity, they wouldn't do it.

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Barbing 32 minutes ago
Is the electricity cost far greater than the marketing value?
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rightnutwingjob 9 minutes ago
The first is a physical quantity that can be written down.

The second is approximately no better than astrology.

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blackdahlia313 17 minutes ago
Enjoy the bounty
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tristanj 5 minutes ago
There is no bounty, RSA labs ended the $75,000 reward in 2007.
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