What are they doing to the metric system, a.k.a. SI? I thought we all knew the standard prefixes, like kilo- for 10^3, mega- for 10^6, and so forth. So who or what is ronna-?

Well, I just learned about it yesterday, from news like this (written by a professor named Ethan Mollick):

I suspect the next few weeks after Grok 4 follows the same pattern as Grok 3 xAI beats everyone to market with the first RonnaFLOP model. The benchmarks show the 10-20% improvement the scaling law suggests. In the coming months, the other labs release their RonnaFLOPs, catch up.

RonnaFLOP? Fortunately, Mollick goes on to explain (sic):

RonnaFLOP: 10^27 FLOPS (Floating point operations, a measure of computing power), This is the compute that went into Grok 4 as I interpreted what they said on the live stream. GPT-4 was likely around 18 YottaFLOPs (1.8*10^25), 100x smaller Scaling improves ability.

Anyway, yes, ronna- is real. Here’s what you want to know:

Categories: Math, Technology