madarsop5 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.DavideNLan hour ago
wslh3 hours ago
> It’s still exponential
It's actually subexponential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve?wpr...
sweisan hour ago
I misspoke and corrected down thread.
cwillu2 hours ago
…but super-polynomial.
schoen40 minutes ago
Like in the song!
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2004-June/00...
aidenn035 minutes ago
When's the coming age of crypto-anarchy?
schoen26 minutes ago
Not sure! It sounded more imminent back in 2000 when I heard Eric Hughes perform the song.
sjs3823 hours ago
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tristanj4 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.
ehe78qhe4 hours ago
Only if you pay a flat rate for electricity and cooling.
tristanj4 hours 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.
Barbing3 hours ago
Is the electricity cost far greater than the marketing value?
adastra22an hour ago
The marginal electricity cost is zero.
rightnutwingjob3 hours ago
The first is a physical quantity that can be written down.
The second is approximately no better than astrology.
ehe78qhe3 hours ago
The second point is, sadly, true of quite a lot of aspects of software, including "design" and "quality"
nullsanityan hour ago
[dead]
odo12422 hours ago
Most of the GPU cost is in the GPUs themselves (and in the space and maintenance costs of the building). Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use.
There is cost, but the cost is mostly the opportunity cost of not being able to do something else.
toast02 hours ago
> Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use.
I don't have any insight on modern GPU datacenters, but in decades past, some owned and operated datacenters didn put effort into making sure power management worked because the cost savings were worth it. I'm pretty sure I saw plans to shed load and power off servers if a utility made a demand response request or in case of loss of cooling. I wouldn't be surprised if some owned and operated data centers do regular full shutdowns at off peak... WOL, IPMI or RTC wakeup can bring them back when needed and if you already have a dynamic service orchestrator and setup times are acceptable, why not shut down if there's no actual priority work and there's also no idle priority opportunistic load either...
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qurren2 hours ago
> it would make more financial sense to mine crypto
GPUs are power-inefficient for mining most crypto so not necessarily. You may end up paying more in electricity than you are able to mine.
Most crypto mining is on ASICs now.
aidenn034 minutes ago
You missed the part where they have already pre-paid for the GPU-hours and they pay the same regardless of he electricity used.
Also, even if they were paying for electricity, they would lose less money mining crypto than factoring RSA numbers.
logicallee2 hours ago
How much crypto do you think the mentioned 30 GPU years would have produced at current exchange rates? They're not as efficient as ASICs but GPU's can still mine a lot...
monster_truckan hour ago
wouldn't even cover the cost of power and cooling otherwise everyone would still be doin it
someguydave3 hours 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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blackdahlia3133 hours ago
Enjoy the bounty
tristanj3 hours ago
There is no bounty, RSA labs ended the $75,000 reward in 2007.
qurren2 hours ago
There's about 900 BTC remaining for anyone who breaks these keys:
https://privatekeys.pw/puzzles/bitcoin-puzzle-tx
If you break one though be careful when redeeming it, there are bots set up to pounce and steal the coins when they are transacted because the reduced entropy makes that possible. You need to submit the transaction to a mining pool that will not broadcast it until it is mined.
gautamcgoel18 minutes ago
Just to confirm: these puzzles are unrelated to RSA, correct?
DoctorOetker2 hours ago
thats a poorly implemented reward script, if it leaves you exposed to the mining pool with this gentleman's agreement.
the script could have been designed 2 phase, so one first submits a hash of the solution & submitter address, so even if miners front-run the submitter, they just helpfully pay the transaction fee!
schoen34 minutes ago
I've recently been working on this exact problem due to my desire to create puzzle challenges for Simplicity, the smart contract programming environment that I work on for my job.
Since Simplicity runs on Bitcoin-like blockchains, someone can swipe the witness data from the legitimate winner's proposed transaction, and create a new transaction (perhaps with a higher fee) using the same claim data and sending the prize to a different address.
Anyway, I ended up implementing a two-phase commit mechanism in which you pay a deposit to temporarily lock the prize so that it can only be paid out to your address. If you then make a valid claim, the prize can be paid to you; if you don't, you forfeit your deposit.
https://community.simplicity-lang.org/t/running-prize-contes...
(I think this was suggested by Russell O'Connor, the inventor of Simplicity, but it may have been a widespread idea in the smart contracts world. I don't know whether there's a straightforward way to implement it with Bitcoin Script, which is what this older prize would have needed.)
LiamPowell2 hours ago
There is no script.
greyface-an hour ago
Of course there's a script; every bitcoin tx output has a script. These challenges use the standard P2PKH script, i.e.:
scriptPubKey: OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <pubKeyHash> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
scriptSig: <sig> <pubKey>