South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

Re:South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production a... by red75prime on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @02:52AM (#48729343)

But for biological neurons to do something that can't be efficiently approximated on a digital computer (but conductive to useful information processing) they need to have unknown unknowns (well, partial unknowns like an unknown quantum algorithm will do too).

We don't know the violations of the physical Church-Turing thesis that are conductive for machine learning. We don't have evidence for their existence in the brain (although, the brain would be the prime candidate for finding them as evolution works directly with the true physical laws).

BTW, large ANNs don't try to model how the brain does things. They are trying to mimic what the brain does. So, using "how many transistors/artificial neurons it takes to model a biological neuron" is not a good approach.

We have no evidence. We even have no solid theories how this can work (Penrose's OrchOR is "OrchOR somehow taps into mathematical knowledge somehow encoded into the structure of spacetime"). But people, for some reason, insist that there should be something there. I can't attribute it to anything else but to deeply entrenched feeling of human exceptionalism.

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Re:South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production a... by formerly_proven on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @03:21AM (#48729511)

You're talking about a philosophical debate whether the brain is computable, the other commenters are pointing out that even conservative estimates point to a brain-like NN requiring over a quadrillion parameters.

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Re:South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production a... by red75prime on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @03:26AM (#48729536)

...assuming that modelling the physical structure of the brain is the only way to model its functions.

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Re:South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production a... by formerly_proven on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @03:28AM (#48729555)

Building a "NN with similar capability as the brain" is not modelling its physical structure. The assumption is not made.

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Re:South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production a... by red75prime on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @03:38AM (#48729632)

Let's define the terms. What does it mean "with similar capacity"? As far as I understand xvilka was taking about the number of artificial neurons required to model a biological neuron times the number of biological neurons in the human brain. It is modelling its physical structure (on a neuronal level).

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Re:South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production a... by Chu4eeno on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @04:45AM (#48730035)

You vastly overestimate how much we know about how our brains work.

Look up the neural correlates replication crisis, and e. g. the "dead salmon" study by Bennett et al.

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Re:South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production a... by red75prime on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @05:04AM (#48730187)

That is we have unknowns that might increase or decrease estimates of computational demands of a functionally equivalent ANN. Not everything that happens in the brain contributes to information processing.

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