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Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

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121–124 of 124 posts

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#121
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the hubris of thinking that way: I would imagine the baseline assumption of your thinking is that things like sleep and emotions are a 'bug' in terms of cognition (or at the very least, 'prompts' that are optional). Said differently, the assumption is that with the right engineer, you could reach human-parity cognition with a model that doesn't sleep or feel emotions (after all what's the point of an LLM if it…

Do airplanes need sleep because they fly like birds who also require sleep?

Here, it's actually fun to respond to your comment in another way, so let's try this out:

Yes, sleep is in fact a prerequisite to planes flying. We have very strict laws about it actually. Most planes are only able to fly because a human (who does sleep) is piloting it.

The drones and other vehicles that can fly without pilots were still programmed by a person (who also needed sleep) FWIW.

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#122
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do airplanes need sleep because they fly like birds who also require sleep?

Ah a very fun 'snippy' question that just proves my point further. Thank you. No airplanes do not sleep. That's part of why their flying is fundamentally different than birds'. You'll likely also notice that birds flap their wings while planes use jet engines and fixed wings. My entire point is that it is foolish to imagine airplanes as mechanical birds, since they are in fact completely different and require their o…

I'm reluctant to ask, but how do ornithopters fit into a sleep paradigm?

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#123

Wild that the human brain can squeeze in 100 trillion synapses ( very roughly analogous to model parameters / transistors) in a 3lb piece of meat that draws 20 Watts. The power efficiency difference may be explainable by the much slower frequency of brain computation (200 Hz vs. 2GHz). My impression is that the main obstacle to achieving a comparable volumetric density is that we haven't cracked 3d stacking of integr…

Hmm maybe the frequency metric is off. If neurons can derive output from potentially N overlapping / multiplexed inputs .. it's as if the clock was N times higher too.

Re: Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom

#124
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah a very fun 'snippy' question that just proves my point further. Thank you. No airplanes do not sleep. That's part of why their flying is fundamentally different than birds'. You'll likely also notice that birds flap their wings while planes use jet engines and fixed wings. My entire point is that it is foolish to imagine airplanes as mechanical birds, since they are in fact completely different and require their o…

I'm reluctant to ask, but how do ornithopters fit into a sleep paradigm?

Great follow up!

Ornithopters are designed by humans who sleep - the complex computers needed to make them work replicate things humans told them to do, right?

It is a very incomplete model of an ornithopter to not include the human.

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