Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks

Re:Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks by ben_w on Thursday August 12, 2021 @09:57AM (#28156402)

The lowest lowball estimate I’ve seen for the computational capacity of the human brain is 20e15 FLOPS (Kurzweil, 1999), and that would require 2/3 of a megawatt with the current best ranked supercomputer on the Green500 list.

There are already several computers more powerful than this that don’t appear close to a working full brain emulation, and we definitely don’t understand intelligence well enough yet to engineer something like ourselves, so it’s reasonable to be skeptical of estimates saying we’ll be at the kilowatts level “soon” even if it turns out we’re just missing a step which will be obvious in hindsight.

(Unless by “soon” you mean 15 years; I don’t want to bet on anything on that timescale).

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Re:Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks by qayxc on Thursday August 12, 2021 @05:29PM (#28161749)

> Unless by “soon” you mean 15 years; I don’t want to bet on anything on that timescale

Well, I'm old so by "soon" I mean within my lifetime, e.g. the next 3 to 4 decades.

edit: to clarify a little, when the term AI was first coined by McCarthy in 1956, researchers were confident in cracking AGI within a decade. Then AI-Winter came and people became more cautious. So when I say "soon", I mean it's probably not going to be another 65 years, but also not 5 months or 5 years (unexpected breakthroughs aside).

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