The following is from the article but I edited it so much by moving sentences around I decided not to use the quote tag.
---
The number is two to the 136,279,841st power minus one. Luke Durant is a 36-year-old programmer retired from chipmaker Nvidia in 2021. The discovery was the result of almost exactly one year of work and about $2 million of Durant’s own money. He used the GPUs, the technology he had a hand in developing at Nvidia. A typical CPU would take a week or two to test a number to see whether it is prime. It takes GPUs about a day or two.
Durant, a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, found the new prime number using only publicly available unused cloud storage space. Durant, who made his money off the boom, said he put his time and money into the project to show people that they aren’t helpless to technology giants and that we can figure out massive problems if we work together. He said...
"Individuals today are dramatically more capable than any point in history. The scale of computing available in the cloud, it’s nearly unfathomable. I was able to find this number that’s astonishingly large … but I was able to do it just by using big tech’s leftovers. So it’s trying to [highlight the fact that] we have these incredible systems, so let’s figure out how to best use them."
Woltman said about 3,000 to 5,000 volunteers have downloaded a piece of software that tasks unused space on their computers to crunch these numbers in the background.
I can't square the circle of "project to show people that they aren't helpless to technology giants and we can figure out massive problems if we work together" and "$2 million of Durant's own money"
Yeah this article makes no sense, really seems like puff piece slapped together in 15 min from a PR email he sent them. Retired 36 year old multi millionaire shows people they too can solve math puzzles for the low price of 2 mill?
using only publicly available unused cloud storage space ... "I was able to do it just by using big tech’s leftovers."
So he ostensibly used donated storage? Is computing primes even storage intensive? What about the compute? Is that where the 2 million went?
Plus what would "publicly available unused space" even be? Cloud providers don't just give stuff away to random people because they aren't using it
He used servers in 17 countries across 24 data centers and on two cloud providers to find the number,
So he was just running this on 2 big cloud services. Did the author just misunderstand him getting some credits from the providers? Did they run his workload as a low priority thing when they were over provisioned, is that what they mean by "leftovers"? Who knows.
he and his programmer father were writing a prime number computer code.
3,00o[sic] to 5,000 volunteers
Come on WashPo doesn't have editors anymore?
Durant said he also spent the time and money on finding a prime number to show that GPUs can be used for more than AI
What a banal statement. Seems like it's just a way to shoehorn in a way to bring up AI in the article.
2 million in equipment is like 700 high end gaming rigs. The future is always gonna come down to organizing our resources so we can face Goliaths together.
