On Tue, Jul 2, 2024 at 12:52 PM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
*> I also see it as surprising that through hardware improvements alone, > and without specific breakthroughs in algorithms, we should see such great > strides in AI.* I was not surprised because the entire human genome only has the capacity to hold 750 MB of information; that's about the amount of information you could fit on an old-fashioned CD, not a DVD, just a CD. The true number must be considerably less than that because that's the recipe for building an entire human being, not just the brain, and the genome contains a huge amount of redundancy, 750 MB is just the upper bound. > *> Humans no longer write the algorithms these neural networks derive, the > training process comes up with them. And much like the algorithms > implemented in the human brain, they are in a representation so opaque and > that they escape our capacity to understand. So I would argue, there have > been massive breakthroughs in the algorithms that underlie the advances in > AI, we just don't know what those breakthroughs are.* That is a very interesting way to look at it, and I think you are basically correct. > *> I think the human brain, with its 600T connections might signal an > upper bound for how many are required, but the brain does a lot of other > things too, so the bound could be lower.* > The human brain has about 86 billion neurons with 7*10^14 synaptic connections (a more generous estimate than yours), but the largest supercomputer in the world, the Frontier Computer at Oak ridge, has 2.5*10^15 transistors, over three times as many. And we know from experiments that a typical synapse in the human brain "fires" between 1 and 50 times per second, but a typical transistor in a computer "fires" about 4 billion times a second (4*10^9). It also has 9.2* 10^15 bites of fast memory. That's why the Frontier Computer can perform 1.1 *10^18 double precision floating point calculations per second and why the human brain can not. By way of comparison, Ray Kurzweil estimates that the hardware needed to emulate a human mind would need to be able to perform 10^16 calculations per second and have 10^12 bytes of memory. And the calculations would not need to be 64 bit double precision floating point, 8 bit or perhaps even 4 bit precision would be sufficient. So in the quest to develop a superintelligence, insufficient hardware is no longer a barrier. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> bom -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0FmETnmRQ2VK_EKxJ%2BmyBjkaetVY6swTT7QRoK_ofqOw%40mail.gmail.com.
