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Re:The Myth of a Superhuman AI by Houshalter on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @09:53PM (#14208600)
In terms of energy consumed for individual computations, yes. Neurons use chemical reactions to communicate and this is terribly inefficient. Transistors use very small amounts of electricity in comparison.

The main difference is computer technology is designed to be very general purpose. The brain is more like an ASIC that's hardwired to run one specific algorithm. GPUs are also computing 16 or more bits of precision, when real neurons are very low precision. There are some other differences, like how real brains are incredibly sparse and most of the synapses at any given time are dormant and not using much energy. They are also very sparsely connected to each other. While our current NNs are very dense and need to spend energy to compute every single connection each cycle.

Re:The Myth of a Superhuman AI by duncanawoods on Thursday April 27, 2017 @02:54AM (#14209699)
It seems premature to make judgements about efficiency when there is so much we do not understand about brain function and consciousness. When you can replicate all brain function, lets compare efficiency. Comparing to an asic reveals the source of your error rather than defends your position.