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.
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.
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...
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.
It's actually subexponential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve?wpr...
Though, it would make more financial sense to mine crypto.
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.
The second is approximately no better than astrology.