Industrialist
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD | August 16, 2026 On my desk is a desktop with an RTX 2080 that is fine. A Titan in an external enclosure still gives a laptop the offload I ask of it. Plenty of people still game on a 1080 Ti. None of these devices became slower because NVIDIA shipped […]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD August 13, 2026 Compute is the new oil again. Before that it was the new electricity. Before that, cloud computing was supposed to become a commodity traded on neutral exchanges. The latest version is more concrete. CME Group and Silicon Data plan to launch two cash-settled futures contracts on October [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD Someone tells you a number: a hundred petaFLOP/s, a million tokens, ninety percent utilized. The first question is never whether the number is right. It is which quantity the number describes. Most disagreements about computing infrastructure are people quoting different quantities at each other, and the confusion survives because the units [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD You may have this same division among your friends and family. At my table it runs between Diet Coke and Coke Zero: a friend drinks the first, I drink the second, and both of us believe the science is on our side. So I went and read the science. A disclosure [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD Everyone who has priced an AI cluster has done this arithmetic. Take the peak, apply an availability number, apply an efficiency number, apply a scheduling number: ninety percent, fifty percent, ninety-five percent, call it 43 percent of peak and move on. Fractions do multiply, but only when they are correctly nested: [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD A series of short companion posts breaks this long map into teachable pieces. It begins with Half Your Cluster Is Missing and continues with On Naming the Quantity. The industry quotes compute in units of intention. Gigawatts announced, accelerators shipped, capital committed, peak FLOP/s on the spec sheet. Contracts are signed [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD The previous post, On Binary Narratives, used the coverage of Moonshot AI s Kimi K3 release to show how a story about many interacting variables gets compressed into one variable with two values. That post was about the method. This one applies it to the second binary inside the same story: open [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD On Friday the Chinese startup Moonshot AI introduced Kimi K3, which it described as the world s largest open-source AI model. The model was available through Moonshot s products and API; the full weights were promised for release by July 27, with the technical report still to come. The New York Times covered [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD July 19, 2026 I have started and sold several companies. I am still a technologist and an operator, but I now have more ways to help than I did when I was younger: investor, advisor, first customer, partner, recruiter of the person who should run it. Capital and time are [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD What is it about human beings that we keep arguing against Jevons paradox? In 1865, William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question and observed that more efficient steam engines had not reduced Britain s coal consumption. They had increased it. Efficiency lowered the cost of work done with coal, the lower cost [ ]
Jason A. Hoffman, PhD May 5, 2026 There is a particular failure mode that plays out when a senior executive joins a company whose founder is still in the building, still engaged, still making the decisions that matter. The executive arrives with credentials, a playbook, a network, and a reflex. The reflex is to [ ]