Paywalled. From an earlier article in Forbes: > Using real neurons avoids several other difficulties that software-based neural networks have. For instance, to get artificial neural networks to start learning well, their programmers usually have to engage in a laborious process of manually adjusting the initial coefficients, or weights, that will be applied to each type of data point the network processes. Another ch…
As someone worried about our climate, I'm very curious about that actually. Is it more efficient to feed neurons biological food (from an energy perspective, since that food needs to be grown on land somewhere and takes up solar energy, it needs water that comes from clouds which were created by evaporation, etc.) than it is to use low-CO2 energy sources (solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, wave, whatever) and power a computer with that?
E.g. electric motors are very efficient compared to combustion, but it's only effective if you get electricity from a non-combustion source or else you might as well use a combustion engine in the vehicle itself. I kind of assumed it's the same for computers, that they efficiently calculate things compared to biology, but I never really thought about it. I'm curious how energy-intensive biological computers are (discounting any R&D that I assume is currently still a big part of the equation).