3 ms·
What good is learning software if you don't have the hardware to run it on (and probably wont for a decade) to attain even mammalian levels of intelligence?
by debacle 14y ago
What good is learning software if you don't have the hardware to run it on (and probably wont for a decade) to attain even mammalian levels of intelligence?
- paulsutter 14y agoCool, that gives them 10 years to prepare. Big advances take time. I'm thrilled that Dustin and Founders Fund are willing to take on investments that have a long time horizon. That's where big breakthroughs will come from.
- pedalpete 14y agoWhat makes you say that the hardware doesn't exist?? I don't see that in the article.
- debacle 14y agohttp://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/artificial-brain-in-10-years/ http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/artificial-brai... That's just one example. We're currently using a machine with 10k cores to model just a piece of the brain of a rat. Neurons fire at up to 1kHz, which means, theoretically, that a modern 4-core CPU could potentially model 5 million neurons, in some sort of crazy 'breaking the laws of physics and ignoring synaptic modeling' scenario. So then we would only need roughly 80 thousand cores to simulate the human brain, ignoring RAM. Keep in mind that's an extremely rough (and terribly bad) guess, which makes a disgustingly bad number of broad assumptions that have no basis in reality. Its only purpose is to show how much better evolution is than us at computing.
- sbanach 14y agoPresumably you're referring to the neuron-level simulations that crop up in the news every time some university gets a new supercomputer? Maybe there are some shortcuts. Just like 10 years ago the only conceivable way of rendering diffuse light was with raytracing or radiosity simulations. Now we have modern techniques like ambient occlusion that makes it reasonably cheap to do in a rasterizer in realtime.
- debacle 14y agoWe can simulate approximations of intelligence now, and those will continue to get better all the time, however, like raytracing, we simply don't have the technology to do real AI at the human scale right now.
- sbanach 14y agoMy point is that should there exist some higher level structure in the brain that is more amenable to simulation than the equivalent quantity of low-level synapses and neurons, then all bets are off about exactly what sort of computer is required to simulate it. The brain has to be replicable by biological processes - who knows what tricks it has to pull to achieve its function? Maybe it's possible to come up with an 'optimizing compiler' that tosses the junk.
- king_magic 14y agoMakes me think back to UltraHLE, and how that was a quantum leap over existing N64 emulators when it came out. Similar approach - UltraHLE didn't emulate every detail of the system. It took a higher-level approach. Obviously not the same thing as emulating the brain :-) but just what came to mind.
- paulgb 14y agoFor anyone not familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraHLE#The_HLE_technique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraHLE#The_HLE_technique Here's hoping the brain is implemented in C ;-)
- sown 14y agoMaybe it's OK if we don't have the HW now. Sort of like in the 1980s, people we're writing accounting or physics software that needed math co-processors n' stuff -- stuff that didn't quite exist in the early 80s on PCs but people went ahead with the software anyways. Eventually the HW worked out. I think it'll work out. And a decade's not soooo long.
- duaneb 14y agoThat's a big assumption - perhaps they can solve this problem and actually make better algorithms.