3 ms·

The way brains store weights, propagate updates, propagate inputs etc. is facilitated by their form and the materials they use and properties they take on. Comp

The way brains store weights, propagate updates, propagate inputs etc. is facilitated by their form and the materials they use and properties they take on. Computers like AlphaGo are essentially doing a very expensive hardware emulation of a completely different computing system. Probably some day "true" native neural network consumer hardware will exist, and I would expect it to be much more efficient. It would be a complete paradigm change from what we have now though, so it's probably going to be awhile.

IanCal 9y ago
A good demonstration of this is if you flip the comparison to something computers find easy. The world's fastest human seems to be able to do maybe 2 calculations per second, I've not got the details but let's assume that's a reasonable yardstick. That's 0.02 FLOPS/W. RIKEN apparently is at about 7GFLOPS/W. That's three hundred billion times more efficient. Not a fair comparison, but that's kind of the point.
cr0sh 9y ago
While not exactly "consumer hardware" - there do exist companies that make and sell neural network hardware; think of it as "embedded research and development" level kind of stuff (in many cases they sell development kits and the like - even to hobbyists who have the cash). For instance: http://www.cognimem.com/index.php http://www.cognimem.com/index.php http://www.general-vision.com/hardware/ http://www.general-vision.com/hardware/ ...and while not inexpensive, and not quite the same as "neural network hardware", Nvidia does sell several deep learning platforms (beyond their GPU offerings): http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/embedded-systems-dev-kits-modules.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/embedded-systems-dev-kits-modul... http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html

IanCal 9y ago

A good demonstration of this is if you flip the comparison to something computers find easy. The world's fastest human seems to be able to do maybe 2 calculations per second, I've not got the details but let's assume that's a reasonable yardstick. That's 0.02 FLOPS/W. RIKEN apparently is at about 7GFLOPS/W. That's three hundred billion times more efficient. Not a fair comparison, but that's kind of the point.

cr0sh 9y ago

While not exactly "consumer hardware" - there do exist companies that make and sell neural network hardware; think of it as "embedded research and development" level kind of stuff (in many cases they sell development kits and the like - even to hobbyists who have the cash). For instance: http://www.cognimem.com/index.php http://www.cognimem.com/index.php http://www.general-vision.com/hardware/ http://www.general-vision.com/hardware/ ...and while not inexpensive, and not quite the same as "neural network hardware", Nvidia does sell several deep learning platforms (beyond their GPU offerings): http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/embedded-systems-dev-kits-modules.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/embedded-systems-dev-kits-modul... http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html