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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)

#161

Post by Nevermark »

RajT88 wrote: post #134
hax0ron3 wrote: post #52

Earlier 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…

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 m…

I worked on a 25 year project that stretched the tech many times in its life.

On many occasions to get ambitious things to work despite a lack of good support, special subsystems were created with whatever wacky solution could be made to work, wrapped in sane surface API’s so the system as a whole could remain organized and accomplish the task well.

Five or so years after any of these were created, they could have easily been replaced with more reasonable code. But they worked reliably and efficiently. Their API’s were sensible and stable. So they accumulated.

If you reviewed all the code as a whole for the first time it was like finding a secret circus.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#162

Post by cornholio »

TheRoque wrote: post #160
cornholio wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moreover, words are already compressed data with a lot of lost information That's exactly the point, 99.9% of the information processed by the 6 year old has went into training his visual cortex, a subsystem not necessary for reasoning. This will eventually be used 8 hours a day for transforming visual representation of text on a computer screen into a compressed textual form which the inner rational loop can easil…

This sounds like a huge oversimplification. A lot of knowledge doesn't come in the form of words, animals, early humans, kids, all don't have speech systems yet are capable of reasoning. You can't become Mozart just by reading the theory of his work, you can't become an expert at anything just by reading the theory in fact, even though it lifts you up. There's definitely things that you know and that aren't in the fo…

> There's definitely things that you know and that aren't in the form of words.

But are they necessary for reasoning? Records of deaf-blinds with IQs a few standard deviations above average seem to suggest even highly restricted sensory inputs can allow for rational thought. It stretches credulity that you could convey more than a few bits of meaning per second to a child purely by hand gestures and touch, let alone the exabytes claimed.

Of course someone like Yann Lecun will say scale is the only solution, he leads one of the juggernauts that uses scale as a competitive moat. We shouldn't expect AI researchers in positions of power to be any less vane, power hungry or human than any other humans.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#163

Post by TheRoque »

cornholio wrote: post #162
TheRoque wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a huge oversimplification. A lot of knowledge doesn't come in the form of words, animals, early humans, kids, all don't have speech systems yet are capable of reasoning. You can't become Mozart just by reading the theory of his work, you can't become an expert at anything just by reading the theory in fact, even though it lifts you up. There's definitely things that you know and that aren't in the fo…

> There's definitely things that you know and that aren't in the form of words. But are they necessary for reasoning? Records of deaf-blinds with IQs a few standard deviations above average seem to suggest even highly restricted sensory inputs can allow for rational thought. It stretches credulity that you could convey more than a few bits of meaning per second to a child purely by hand gestures and touch, let alone…

This is on point that you mention IQ, since in IQ itself, only a single test includes words. The rest is about pattern recognition, working memory, spatial capabilities and other stuff I don't remember. So in other words, the metric you use as a benchmark for good reasoning barely measures the literacy

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#164

Post by karma_pharmer »

rerdavies wrote: post #84
thangalin wrote: post #37

2038. * 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

Powered by what?

Solar panels in a place where the sun doesn't even rise for months at a time? That big beefy transmission grid that the Antarctic continent is so famous for? The jillions of oil wells already drilled into the Antarctic?

Oh wait, I know: penguin guano.

Pass the crack pipe, you've had enough my friend.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#165

Post by naveen99 »

pixl97 wrote: post #71
awesomeMilou wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing the capability of the human brain to performance alone is too simplistic, especially when looking at LLM's. Even if we would assign some intelligence to LLM's, they need a 400w GPU at inference time, and several orders of magnitude more of those at training time. The human brain runs constanly at ~20w. I highly doubt you'd be able to get even close to that kind of performance with current manufacturing proce…

>The human brain runs constanly at ~20w. Most likely because any brains that required more energy died off at evolutionary time scales. And while there are some problems with burning massive amounts of energy to achieve a task (see: global warming) this is not likely a significant short falling that large scale AI models have to worry about. Seemingly there are plenty of humans willing to hook them up to power source…

Some of that 8 hrs of sleep includes fine tuning on recent experiences and simulation (dreams).

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#166

Post by naveen99 »

geysersam wrote: post #33

The 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.

Atleast it’s better / less futile than extrapolating universal expansion back in time to the Big Bang. but maybe not too much.

Computers are already great peripherals for brains. Maybe brains will become peripherals for computers or become completely replaced.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#167

Post by FrustratedMonky »

akomtu wrote: post #126
thangalin wrote: post #37

2038. * 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…

Simulating a 100 neuron nematode is still an unsolved problem.

There is a simulation. The simulation was even loaded to a robot that then behaved disturbingly like a worm.

What does 'unsolved' mean in this context?

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#168

Post by cornholio »

TheRoque wrote: post #163
cornholio wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's definitely things that you know and that aren't in the form of words. But are they necessary for reasoning? Records of deaf-blinds with IQs a few standard deviations above average seem to suggest even highly restricted sensory inputs can allow for rational thought. It stretches credulity that you could convey more than a few bits of meaning per second to a child purely by hand gestures and touch, let alone…

This is on point that you mention IQ, since in IQ itself, only a single test includes words. The rest is about pattern recognition, working memory, spatial capabilities and other stuff I don't remember. So in other words, the metric you use as a benchmark for good reasoning barely measures the literacy

Okay, but that's a markedly different problem than the information density of the training data. It's: "can a rational machine trained only with natural language descriptions of the world form complex representations of it and solve associated problems described only in natural language?".

For you and me, a verbal description of a pattern test such as "You are given seven squares. Square A contains a filled cross in the upper left position, an empty circle in the middle... etc." would send us grasping for pen and paper. But with training many people can play mental chess, there are famous blind theoretical physicists and so on. This all seems to suggest that natural language could be called "Turing complete", to bastardize the term, for describing the real world to a rational entity and formulating solutions to real world problems.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#169

Post by kazinator »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #52
geysersam wrote: post #33

The 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…

It's because nature never actually had to solve that problem: "how do we encode the structure we have here into genes and chromosomes so that it can procreate".

The genes randomly mutate, and their result is subject to fitness testing.

The fascinating thing about evolution is that it's not actually necessary. The "unevolved" creatures persist just fine. The continued survival of cockroaches and whatnot proves that evolving to human levels is superfluous.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#170

Post by Teever »

almostnormal wrote: post #38
BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find incredible about the progress of computing power is that there isn't anything that actually makes Moore's law a given. Engineers keep discovering advances in materials science and manufacturing that enable advancements on such a consistent pace. Is this a fluke? Luck? What enables this?

The market does. New stuff needs to be sold every year, and needs to be some amount faster to find a buyer. The cost of development is minimized while still reaching that goal, limiting the gain to no more than necessary.

That's like saying that the storke brings babies. It doesn't really answer the question, it just pushes it off for another day.

Why don't we see exponential density growth in other products? What would that even look lke anyways?

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