09 · Hardware & Infrastructure
FLOP / FLOPS
Floating-Point Operations (Per Second)
The basic unit of compute. FLOPs (plural) often means total operations to train a model; FLOPS (per second) measures hardware speed. Scaled up as TFLOPS / PFLOPS / EFLOPS (Tera/Peta/Exa). A frontier training run now totals on the order of 10²⁶–10²⁷ of these operations.
Concrete example
For reference, the EU AI Act uses 10²⁵ FLOPs of training compute as a rebuttable presumption that a general-purpose model has high-impact capabilities.
Nearby in Hardware & Infrastructure
Evidence
Sources for this definition
- 1Trends in Artificial Intelligence
Epoch AI · Research · checked 2026-07-13
- 2Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act)
EUR-Lex · Regulator · checked 2026-07-13