3 ms·
Fascinating background - would love to pick your brain on how you see current LLMs/ML comparing to neuroscience. What do you see that's missing still, if anyth
by dogcomplex 2y ago
Fascinating background - would love to pick your brain on how you see current LLMs/ML comparing to neuroscience. What do you see that's missing still, if anything?
If I had to bet, I would start with:
- Error-correcting specialized architectures for increasing signal-to-noise (as far as I can tell these are what everyone is racing to build this year, and should be doable with just conventional programming systems wrapping LLMs)
- Improved energy efficiency (as yes, human brains are currently much more efficient! But - there are also simple architecture improvements (both software and hardware) that are looking to save 100x. Specialized ASIC ternary chips using 1999's tech should be here quite soon, a lot more efficient in price and energy.)
- No Backwards-propagation. (As yes, the brain does seem to do it all with forward-propagation only. Though this is possible and promising in neural networks like the Forward-Forward algorithm too, they haven't been trained to the same scales as backprop-heavy transformers (and likely have a lower performance in terms of noise/accuracy). Though if I'm not mistaken, the brain does have forward-backward loops, but the signals go through separate neurons for each direction (rather than reusing one) - if so that's close to backprop by itself, but probably imposes a tradeoff as the same signal can't be perfectly reproduced backwards, yet it can perhaps be enhanced to be just the most relevant information by the separate specialized neuron. I'm obviously mostly ignorant of the neuroscience here but halfway-knowledgeable on the ML theory haha
But yes, I completely agree - the flood gates are already open. This is a few architecture quibbles away from an absolute deluge of artificial intelligence that will dwarf (drown?) anything we've known. Good point on decentralized cheap autonomy - the real accomplishment of life. Intelligence, as it appears, is just a fairly generous phenomenon where any autonomous process continually improves its signal-to-noise ratio... many ways to accomplish that one! Looking forward to seeing LLMs powered by ant colonies and slime molds, though I suspect by then there will be far more interesting and terrifying realities unlocked.