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When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
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Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
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Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
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Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
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Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
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Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#662038. * 86 billion neurons in a brain [1] * 400 transistors to simulate a synapse [2] That's 34 trillion, 400 billion transistors to simulate a human brain. As of 2024, the GB200 Grace Blackwell GPU has 208 billion MOSFETs[3]. In 2023, AMD's MI300A CPU had 146 billion transistors[3]. In 2021, the Versal VP1802 FPGA had 92 billion transistors[3]. Intel projects 1 trillion by 2030; TSMC suggests 200 billion by 2030. We…
Too many presumptions.
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#67Moravac (in the linked paper): "In both cases, the evidence for an intelligent mind lies in the machine's performance, not its makeup." Do you agree? I'm much less keen to ascribe "intelligence" to large, pretrained language models given that I know how primitive their training regime is compared to a scenario where I might have been "blended" by their ability to "chat" (double quote here since I know ChatGPT and the…
This is reminding me again of The Bitter Lesson. http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
From that article: "actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex".
But they're not. The "bitter lesson" of machine learning is that the primitive operations are really simple. You just need a lot of them, and as you add more, it gets better.
Now we have a better idea of how evolution did it.
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#682038. * 86 billion neurons in a brain [1] * 400 transistors to simulate a synapse [2] That's 34 trillion, 400 billion transistors to simulate a human brain. As of 2024, the GB200 Grace Blackwell GPU has 208 billion MOSFETs[3]. In 2023, AMD's MI300A CPU had 146 billion transistors[3]. In 2021, the Versal VP1802 FPGA had 92 billion transistors[3]. Intel projects 1 trillion by 2030; TSMC suggests 200 billion by 2030. We…
> * 86 billion neurons in a brain [1]*
> * 400 transistors to simulate a synapse [2]*
> * That's 34 trillion, 400 billion transistors to simulate a human brain.*
You forgot about:
1-Astrocytes - more common than neurons, computational, have their own style of internal and external signaling, have bi-directional communication with neurons at the synapse (and are thought to control the neurons)
2-Synapse: a single synapse can be both excitatory and inhibitory depending on it's structure and the permeant ions inside and outside the cell at that point in time and space - are your 400 transistors handling all of that dynamic capability?
3-Brain waves: are now shown to be causal (influencing neuron behavior) not just a by-product of activity. Many different types of waves (different frequencies) that operate very locally (high freq), or broadly (low freq). Information is encoded in frequency, phase, space and time.
This is the summary, the details are even more interesting and complex. Some of the details are probably not adding computational capabilities, but many clearly are.
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#69[deleted]
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#70The estimate for how many operations per second the brain does is quite a wild guess. It starts out very reasonable, estimating the amount of information the eyes feed to the brain. But from there on it's really just a wild guess. We don't know how the brain processes visual input, we don't know what the fundamental unit of processing in the brain is, or if there is one.
It also blows my mind that that, even though DNA seems to just code for proteins and does not store a schematic for a brain in any way that we've been able to decipher so far, human eggs pretty reliably end up growing into people who 9 months after conception already have a bunch of stuff, including visual processing, working. Of course the DNA is not the only input, there is also the mother's body, the whole process…
The story of what we know so far about the development process is fascinating and captured in this book "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" by Sean B. Carroll (2005)