12 ms·
No. You can't easily equate human intelligence to required processing power but I've seen estimates of 10^15 to 10^18 FLOPS [1]. There's a huge variance there.
by jmyeet 5y ago
No.
You can't easily equate human intelligence to required processing power but I've seen estimates of 10^15 to 10^18 FLOPS [1]. There's a huge variance there. Now consider the cost per FLOPS [2] and the energy cost of that [3].
Capital costs are still huge but let's focus on energy. You're talking in the megawatt energy range. That's... expensive. Particularly at scale. There have been and continue to be improvements in this but we're so far away from some superhuman AGI.
Remember too that this would still require thousands of units and then you have to deal with the interconnects, cooling, space and so on.
Building somethin gmore compact has significant heat dissipation issues even if you conquer the engineering challenges (eg lithography is inherently two-dimensional, multiple layers notwithstanding).
[1]: https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/ https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/
[2]: https://aiimpacts.org/2019-recent-trends-in-gpu-price-per-flops/ https://aiimpacts.org/2019-recent-trends-in-gpu-price-per-fl...
[3]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.11313.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.11313.pdf
- ASalazarMX 5y agoIs this an instance of Betteridge's law of headlines in the wild? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines).
- mkaic 5y ago(author here) Haha, maybe, though my original title got edited by a moderator (it was originally a much more overconfident "The Singularity Is Close"), so maybe I've been Betteridge-sniped?
- ASalazarMX 5y agoMy feed reader caught the title as "The Singularity is Close", so indeed it was edited to "The singularity is close?". Both are different from the article's title "The singularity is very close". You were set up :)
- mkaic 5y agoYeah, TIL that HN literally doesn't allow the word "very" in headlines! Kinda cool, I guess they're trying to fight against sensationalism.
- mkaic 5y agoHi! Author here, thanks for sharing your thoughts! Counterarguments: 1. cost per FLOP (in both wattage and dollars) will be drastically lower in 20 years from now. I personally like to think it may be as much as 100x lower, but that's just speculation. 2. the brain manages to be sentient on just 15-ish watts, so there's no fundamental reason that sentience has to suck up massive amounts of energy. 3. I think trying to measure the brain's computational ability in FLOPS is a somewhat apples-to-oranges comparison. The study you link to does it by trying to measure how much it would take to simulate all the neurons and synapses in a brain, but there's no fundamental reason that sentient AI needs to be structured anything like the brain anyways. Thoughts?
- cmsj 5y agoMy main thought whenever I hear my brain capacity trying to be measured in FLOPS is that I'm pretty sure I can't actually even calculate a single FLOP per second ;)