“Floating point operations per second” is usually abbreviated FLOPS. I think using FLOPs as a synonym for FLOPS seems wrong in a particularly confusing way. It really suggests that FLOP is the acronym and the “s” is for a plural. Compare to someone saying SMs instead of SMS.
That said, I agree that using FLOPs as the plural of “floating point operation” is confusing since it is pretty similar to FLOPS. It’s also not something I’ve seen much outside of the futurist crowd (though I am guilty of using it fairly often). Another way in which the ML and futurist usage is nonstandard is that we often use FLOPS sloppily to talk about very low precision or even integer arithmetic.
I haven’t personally seen this cause very much confusion, in my experience it maybe increases the amount of “compute stock vs flow” confusion by like 25-50% from a small-ish baseline? I suspect it’s small enough that accessibility and using standard notation is significantly more important. (Though again, my sense is that FLOPs for “floating point operations” is not really standard and not particularly accessible, so it seems more plausible futurists should stop doing that.)
Not sure what’s realistic to do here. I’m a bit inclined to use “operations” or “ops” to both avoid this ambiguity and be more inclusive of integer arithmetic, but I kind of wouldn’t expect that to stick and maybe it’s bad in some other way. Using FLOP as a plural noun is pretty unsatisfying and I suspect it is unlikely to stick for fundamental linguistic reasons. Switching to using FLOP/s instead of FLOPS may be realistic, though I think flop/s is a bit less weird-looking to me.
ETA: though I think openphil has been using FLOP/s and FLOP as you suggest in their writing, so maybe I’m wrong about whether it’s realistic. I think the draw to add an s to plurals is strongest in spoken language, though unfortunately that’s also where the ambiguity is worst.
As for using FLOP as a plural noun, that’s how other units work. We use 5 m for 5 meters, 5 s for 5 seconds, 5 V for 5 volts, etc. so it’s not that weird.
This feels easier to me when writing and significantly harder for spoken language (where I have a strong inclination to add the s). I guess it’s probably worth thinking separately about talking vs writing, and this post is mostly about writing, in which case I’m probably sold.
In spoken language, you could expand the terms to “floating-point operations” vs “floating-point operations per second” (or just “operations (per second)” if that felt more apt)
Could write “FLOPS-seconds” maybe, which, although a bit wordy, resembles the common usage of “kilowatt-hours” instead of a more directly joule-based unit.
“Floating point operations per second” is usually abbreviated FLOPS. I think using FLOPs as a synonym for FLOPS seems wrong in a particularly confusing way. It really suggests that FLOP is the acronym and the “s” is for a plural. Compare to someone saying SMs instead of SMS.
That said, I agree that using FLOPs as the plural of “floating point operation” is confusing since it is pretty similar to FLOPS. It’s also not something I’ve seen much outside of the futurist crowd (though I am guilty of using it fairly often). Another way in which the ML and futurist usage is nonstandard is that we often use FLOPS sloppily to talk about very low precision or even integer arithmetic.
I haven’t personally seen this cause very much confusion, in my experience it maybe increases the amount of “compute stock vs flow” confusion by like 25-50% from a small-ish baseline? I suspect it’s small enough that accessibility and using standard notation is significantly more important. (Though again, my sense is that FLOPs for “floating point operations” is not really standard and not particularly accessible, so it seems more plausible futurists should stop doing that.)
Not sure what’s realistic to do here. I’m a bit inclined to use “operations” or “ops” to both avoid this ambiguity and be more inclusive of integer arithmetic, but I kind of wouldn’t expect that to stick and maybe it’s bad in some other way. Using FLOP as a plural noun is pretty unsatisfying and I suspect it is unlikely to stick for fundamental linguistic reasons. Switching to using FLOP/s instead of FLOPS may be realistic, though I think flop/s is a bit less weird-looking to me.
ETA: though I think openphil has been using FLOP/s and FLOP as you suggest in their writing, so maybe I’m wrong about whether it’s realistic. I think the draw to add an s to plurals is strongest in spoken language, though unfortunately that’s also where the ambiguity is worst.
As for using FLOP as a plural noun, that’s how other units work. We use 5 m for 5 meters, 5 s for 5 seconds, 5 V for 5 volts, etc. so it’s not that weird.
This feels easier to me when writing and significantly harder for spoken language (where I have a strong inclination to add the s). I guess it’s probably worth thinking separately about talking vs writing, and this post is mostly about writing, in which case I’m probably sold.
In spoken language, you could expand the terms to “floating-point operations” vs “floating-point operations per second” (or just “operations (per second)” if that felt more apt)
Could write “FLOPS-seconds” maybe, which, although a bit wordy, resembles the common usage of “kilowatt-hours” instead of a more directly joule-based unit.