I bet never. Brains are not computers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39751509
When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
131–140 of 186 posts
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The hardware of one GPU can be used to simulate billions of neurons in realtime. You mean simulate billions artificial neurons, right? You can't simulate a single biological neuron yet because it's way too complex and they still don't even understand all of the details. If they did have all of the details, at minimum you would need to simulate the concentrations of ions internally and externally as well as the elec…
Depends a bit on how certain you are on your preferred answer to the question: is the brain analog or digital? If you think it is predominantly digital, quite a lot of the details of the biochemical mechanisms don't matter. If you think it is predominantly analog, they matter hugely.
Do any serious theories on the brain being predominantly digital hold any water with neuroscientists? I feel like it's fairly well accepted that the brain isn't digital even just with what we do understand about neurons?
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#1332038. * 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…
Another interesting angle is power consumption. The brain consumes about 20W so that’s ~200pW/neuron. The GPU is 4 orders of magnitude worse at ~2uW/neuron.
The brain also does much more than a GPU. I’m not sure what percentage of the brain could be considered devoted to equivalent computation but is also interesting to think about. I’ve seen that the brains memory is equivalent to ~2PB. The power of a 12TB hard drive is ~6W. So current tech has a long way to go if it’s ever going to get close to the brain, 2PB storage is about 1kW alone.
That’s pretty impressive for a bunch of goo that resulted from a random process.
Makes me think we are barking up the wrong tree with silicon based computing.
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#134The 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…
I had a DevOps engineer describe their deployment automation system as a "Giant Rube Goldberg Machine". Which of course, all programming is a giant Rube Goldberg machine, if you think about it. If you take the "Goldberg" analogy to mean "Haphazard" and not well-thought out intentional structuring, I suppose it'd be more appropriate to compare a well-written application to a mechanical swiss watch.
Living beings are more "Rube Goldberg" than "Swiss Watch" - by virtue that they came to being guided not by intention, but circumstance.
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#135Next century.
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#1362038. * 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…
> Blackwell GPU has 208 billion MOSFETs[3] Things us hard sci fi fans will insist on: - You have significantly undercounted transistors. As of 2024 you can put up to 8.4 terabytes of LPDDR5X memory into an NVidia Grace Blackwell rack. So that's 72 trillion transistors (and another 72 trillion capacitors) right there. - A GPU executes significantly faster than a neuron. - The hardware of one GPU can be used to simulat…
> Antarctica, perhaps.
Skull Volcano lair on an island. Geothermal energy to power the place. Seawater for liquid cooling.
Then of course, you also need the beautiful but corruptible woman as some high-up part of the organization. And a chief of security in your evil enterprise with some sort of weird deformity or scarring - preferably on the face.
Protip: If you catch a foreign spy on the island, kill them immediately. Do not explain your master plan to them just before you kill them.
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Not to be confused with the Sean M Carroll
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#138Moravac (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…
I agree with Moravec. As he points out a bit later on: > Only on the outside, where they can be appreciated as a whole, will the impression of intelligence emerge. A human brain, too, does not exhibit the intelligence under a neurobiologist's microscope that it does participating in a lively conversation. We only have fuzzy definitions of "intelligence", not any essential, unambiguous things we can point to at a minu…
Agreed, kind of similar to the trope of 'virtual intelligences' vs 'artificial intelligences' in sci-fi, where VIs are a lot more similar to LLM intelligence (imitative, often unable to learn, able to make simple inferences and hold basic conversation but lacking that instantly recognizable 'spark' of an intelligent being that we can see in humans - especially kids - and some other animals) rather than AIs, which are 'true' intelligences comparing to or exceeding humans in every way.
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#139The 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…
newborns barely know how to see, they have to learn it.
https://lozierinstitute.org/dive-deeper/the-newborn-senses-s...
Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends a bit on how certain you are on your preferred answer to the question: is the brain analog or digital? If you think it is predominantly digital, quite a lot of the details of the biochemical mechanisms don't matter. If you think it is predominantly analog, they matter hugely.
Do any serious theories on the brain being predominantly digital hold any water with neuroscientists? I feel like it's fairly well accepted that the brain isn't digital even just with what we do understand about neurons?
I don't think it's possible to tell at this point.
If you looked at the operation of a digital computer, you'd find an analog substrate, with some quite interesting properties. Deciding whether the analog substrate is an important semantic element of how the computer worked, or whether its operation should be understand digitally, is as much a (research-driving) leap of faith as anything else.