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Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

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Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#101

Post by greenthrow »

cynusx wrote: post #31

The comparison doesn't really hold. He is comparing energy spend during inference in humans with energy spend during training in LLM's. Humans spend their lifetimes training their brain so one would have to sum up the total training time if you are going to compare it to the training time of LLM's. At age 30 the total energy use of the brain sums up to about 5000 Wh, which is 1440 times more efficient. But at age 30…

The article is a bit of a stretch but this is even more of a stretch. Humans can do way more than an LLM, humans are never in only learning mode, our brains are always at least running our bodies as well, etc.

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#102

Post by greenthrow »

dist-epoch wrote: post #74
cynusx wrote: post #31

The comparison doesn't really hold. He is comparing energy spend during inference in humans with energy spend during training in LLM's. Humans spend their lifetimes training their brain so one would have to sum up the total training time if you are going to compare it to the training time of LLM's. At age 30 the total energy use of the brain sums up to about 5000 Wh, which is 1440 times more efficient. But at age 30…

For every calorie a human consumes, hundreds or thousands more are used by external support systems. So yeah, you do use 2000 calories a day, but unless you live in an isolated jungle tribe, vast amounts of energy are consumed on delivering you food, climate control, electricity, water, education, protection, entertainment and so on.

Are you going to include all the externalities to build and power the datacenters behind LLMs then? Because i guarantee those far outweigh what it takes to feed one human.

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#103

Post by moffkalast »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #53

I don't care. I've come to the conclusion that gpt and gemini and all the others are nothing but conversational search engines. They can give me ideas or point me in the right direction but so do regular search engines. I like the conversation ability but, in the end, I cannot trust their results and still have to research further to decide for myself if their results are valid.

Replace "gpt and gemini and all the others" with "people" and funny enough your statement is still perfectly accurate.

You have a rough mathematical approximation of what's already a famously unreliable system. Expecting complete accuracy instead of about-rightness from it seems mad to me. And there are tons of applications where that's fine, otherwise our civilization wouldn't be here today at all.

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#104

Post by bamboozled »

Jensson wrote: post #99
bamboozled wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans spend their lifetimes training their brain I don't think this is true personally, ideally as children, we spend out time having fun and learning about the world is a side effect. This borg like thinking applied to intelligence because we have LLMs is unusual to me. I learned surfing through play and enjoyment, not through training like a robot. We can train for something with intention, but I think that is mos…

> we spend out time having fun and learning about the world is a side effect What do you think "play" is? Animals play to learn about themselves and the world, you see most intelligent animals play as kids with the play being a simplification of what they do as adults. Human kids similarly play fight, play build things, play cook food, play take care of babies etc, it is all to make you ready for an adult life. Playi…

But I just play because it's fun, I roll dice for fun, are you trying to tell me all this is a secret front for "training" ?

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#105

Post by Jensson »

scotty79 wrote: post #42
Synaesthesia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, only a brain can "think" and be original. A computer is limited to what we input to it. An "AI" simply recapitulates what it was trained on.

Do a little exercise for me. Try to be as creative as you can be and imagine how a space alien might look. It's a combination of what you have already seen, read about or heard of, isn't it?

People come up with stuff like this: https://i.redd.it/oenn6vi61ag21.png

Or this: https://preview.redd.it/finally-made-my-scientist-species-to...

Humans are capable of thinking and fleshing out novel concepts, current AI are not. Sure your first thing will greatly resemble current things, but as you iterate and get further and further away from existing things what you do stops being an imitation and starts being its onw thing. Current AI can't do that.

Then when you got an initial concept, you can start adding more similar things and now you have built a whole new world or ecosystem. That is where all the wondrous things we have in our current images and stories comes from. An AI that is to replace us must be able to achieve similar things.

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#106

Post by bamboozled »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #97
bamboozled wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it quite differently, we don't have to be so creative, we need to get better at appreciating what already exists. Think about how far out most sea creatures really are, a bluebottle, a starfish for example... Personally I think there is a bit of evidence in your comment that we don't really understand our minds or cognition very well.

We unquestionably as a species do not understand our minds, and that will always be an unpopular opinion because people want certainty and control.

I see a lot of "fashionable" thinking in these comments personally.

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#107

Post by mensetmanusman »

madsbuch wrote: post #17

There is an immensely strong dogma that, to my best knowledge, is not founded in any science or philosophy: First we must lay down certain axioms (smart word for the common sense/ground rules we all agree upon and accept as true). One of such would be the fact that currently computers do not really understand words. ... The author is at least honest about his assumptions. Which I can appreciate. Most other people jus…

It’s a reasonable axiom, because for many people understanding involves qualia. If you believe LLM have qualia, you also believe a very large Excel sheet with the right numbers has an experience of consciousness and feels pain or something where the document is closed.

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#108

Post by Reason077 »

bamboozled wrote: post #100
Reason077 wrote: post #91

I guess this explains why the machines in The Matrix went to so much effort to create the matrix and “farm” humans for their brain energy. It’s just so much more efficient than running their AI control software on silicon-based hardware!

In The Matrix I think people are used as batteries not processors.

That explanation never made any sense to me. Plenty of much easier ways for the machines to generate vastly more energy with far less hassle than using humans as “batteries”. There must be more to it than that!

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#109

Post by Jensson »

bamboozled wrote: post #104
Jensson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we spend out time having fun and learning about the world is a side effect What do you think "play" is? Animals play to learn about themselves and the world, you see most intelligent animals play as kids with the play being a simplification of what they do as adults. Human kids similarly play fight, play build things, play cook food, play take care of babies etc, it is all to make you ready for an adult life. Playi…

But I just play because it's fun, I roll dice for fun, are you trying to tell me all this is a secret front for "training" ?

Fun is your brain rewarding you for something it thinks is practice on a useful skill. You get bored once you mastered it enough.

Some people continue playing a game even when it stops being fun, they are addicted to the reward mechanism in the game, and now the brain thinks that playing the game is a good way to work and provide for itself. I don't call that "play", its work, just not productive work.

Why is dice fun? Because your brain wants to map the pattern of the dice, trying to figure out how to get good rolls. You see that in most dice players, they develop a lot of superstition about what is good and bad dice, or how they always roll bad in critical moments etc. I'd assume that is from nature where you try to figure out what is a good nut to crack or where to find prey etc, basically a way to figure out useful patterns from random events.

Re: Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

#110

Post by glenstein »

bamboozled wrote: post #96
cynusx wrote: post #31

The comparison doesn't really hold. He is comparing energy spend during inference in humans with energy spend during training in LLM's. Humans spend their lifetimes training their brain so one would have to sum up the total training time if you are going to compare it to the training time of LLM's. At age 30 the total energy use of the brain sums up to about 5000 Wh, which is 1440 times more efficient. But at age 30…

Humans spend their lifetimes training their brain I don't think this is true personally, ideally as children, we spend out time having fun and learning about the world is a side effect. This borg like thinking applied to intelligence because we have LLMs is unusual to me. I learned surfing through play and enjoyment, not through training like a robot. We can train for something with intention, but I think that is mos…

>we spend out time having fun and learning about the world is a side effect

I think the part of this that resonates as most true to me is how this reframes learning in a way that tracks truth more closely. It's not all the time, 100% of the time, it's in fits and starts, its opportunistic, and there are long intervals that are not active learning.

But the big part where I would phrase things differently is in the insistence that play in and of itself is not a form of learning. It certainly is, or certainly can be, and while you're right that it's something other than Borg-like accumulation I think there's still learning happening there.

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