? you sure about that? in a single transistor? over what time period, more than nanoseconds? milliamps is huge, and there are millions of transistors on a single chip these days, and with voltage drops of ... 3V? .7V? you're talking major power. FETs should be operating on field more than flow, though there is some capacitive charge/discharge.
Also the transistors are working at 1V or lower, but as you say they are FETs and don't have the same Vbe drop as a BJT.
We know things like sleep, hunger, fear, and stress all impact how we think, yet people want to still build this mental model that synapses are just dot products that either reach an activation threshold or don't.
I would imagine the baseline assumption of your thinking is that things like sleep and emotions are a 'bug' in terms of cognition (or at the very least, 'prompts' that are optional).
Said differently, the assumption is that with the right engineer, you could reach human-parity cognition with a model that doesn't sleep or feel emotions (after all what's the point of an LLM if it gets tired and doesn't want to answer your questions sometimes? Or even worse knowingly deceives you because it is mad at you or prejudiced against you).
The problem with that assumption is that as far as we can tell, every being with even the slightest amount of cognition sleeps in some form and has something akin to emotional states. As far as we can prove, sleep and emotions are necessary preconditions to cognition.
A worldview where the 'good' parts of the brain (reasoning and logic) are replicated in LLM but the 'bad' parts (sleep, hunger, emotions, etc.) are not is likely an incomplete model.
No airplanes do not sleep. That's part of why their flying is fundamentally different than birds'.
You'll likely also notice that birds flap their wings while planes use jet engines and fixed wings.
My entire point is that it is foolish to imagine airplanes as mechanical birds, since they are in fact completely different and require their own mental models to understand.
This is analogous to LLMs. They do something completely different than what our brains do and require their own mental models in order to understand them completely.
Ornithopters are designed by humans who sleep - the complex computers needed to make them work replicate things humans told them to do, right?
It is a very incomplete model of an ornithopter to not include the human.
Yes, sleep is in fact a prerequisite to planes flying. We have very strict laws about it actually. Most planes are only able to fly because a human (who does sleep) is piloting it.
The drones and other vehicles that can fly without pilots were still programmed by a person (who also needed sleep) FWIW.
That seems implausible. Apple's M2 has 20 billion transistors and draws 15 watts at full power [1]. Even assuming that 90% of those transistors are for cache and not logic, that would still be 2 billion logic transistors * 1 milliampere = 2 million amperes at full power. That would imply a voltage of 7.5 microvolts, which is far too low for silicon transistors.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17431/apple-announces-m2-soc-...
Just add a factor 2^D transistors for each original "brain transistor" and re-run your hardware. Hope field effects don't count, and cross your fingers that neurons are idempotent!
Easy! /s
Modelling an analog system in digital will always have a combinatorial curse of dimensionality. Modelling a biological system is so insanely complex I can't even begin to think about it.
One important reason for the difference in current is that transistors need to reliably switch between two reliably distinguishable states, which requires a comparatively high current, whereas synapses are very analog in nature. It may not be possible to reach the brain’s efficiency with deterministic binary logic.