4 ms·

Your brain could be considered a general intelligence, and it only uses a couple of watts. Energy consumption isn't the issue. However, I agree. AI is a bit ove

• Robotbeat 9y ago
  It only uses a couple of watts (well, ten times that, actually, about 20 Watts), but that's because neurons are incredibly efficient. The brain is an Exa-ops computer that only requires 20 Watts. If we used today's state of the art TPUs, we're looking at 10,000 to 100,000 times the energy consumption, so on the order of a Megawatt. The electricity costs alone would be higher than the typical human wage. A corollary: If you can find a way to grow neural tissue (I'm thinking of all the lab-grown meat startups here) and connect to it efficiently and reliably (I'm thinking of Neuralink, here), then you would have access to a computational medium that is orders of magnitude more efficient than even the best of today's processors, and probably way cheaper, too.
  • chillacy 9y ago
    > an Exa-ops computer I think it's misleading to compare the brain to a computer, the architecture differences mean that the brain is great at some stuff (vision for instance) and terrible at others (multiply 2 64-bit integers in your head). I don't know if computational meat will ever be faster than machines at number crunching. (when I say machines I'm including next-generation computers beyond silicon too). But that's okay, each seems to complement each other's weaknesses. http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...