Especially in discussions about AI, the abbreviation "FLOPs" is being used for both "floating point operations per second" (a measure of computational power) and "floating point operations" (a measure of total computations, and equivalent to the previous term times seconds). This is ambiguous and confusing. For clarity, I propose people avoid this specific abbreviation and instead use the alternatives of "FLOP" (for floating point operations) and "FLOP/s" (for floating point operations per second).
Here's a quote from someone on EleutherAI discord 2 weeks ago:
I believe the first "flops" is FLOP/s and the second "flops" is FLOP, although I'm not 100% confident. I replied asking for clarification and didn't get a straight answer.