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The brain has hyperspecialized and hyperoptimized single-purpose hardware. Human AI systems run on more general-purpose machines with a few decades spent improv
by osmarks 5y ago
The brain has hyperspecialized and hyperoptimized single-purpose hardware. Human AI systems run on more general-purpose machines with a few decades spent improving the hardware. Blaming the software is silly.
- wearywanderer 5y agoI'm not talking about running general purpose CPUs. I'm talking about the most high end specialized silicon we have. Throw the best TPUs ever made at the problem and you still won't get anywhere even remotely close to what the squishy pink meat can do. The power gap is so huge, our software simply must be inadequate. We're talking about a power gap wider than the gap between my toaster oven and the Saturn V.
- osmarks 5y agoI rechecked some random internet articles, and the brain contains about 10^15 synapses. They operate at about 10Hz (~10 PFLOPS). If we arbitrarily assume that each synapse operation is equivalent to 1 floating point operation on a computer, then this is about 3 orders of magnitude more than a good GPU (~10 TFLOPS). Which is actually a lot less than I thought. Still, the brain's basic structures have been optimized over ridiculous amounts of time, the training data those get while you exist is years of high-resolution images/sound/etc, and being a smaller in-skull device it has advantages of lower latency than, say, a cluster used to train ML models.
- jonplackett 5y agoI think the link between 1 floating point operation and 1 synapse is probably a bit dubious.