A better title would be “Supercomputer that could conceivably simulate entire human brain, based on a rough estimate of what it would take to do that if we had any idea how to do that, will switch on in 2024”.
For real. I’m reading the title all wondering how the fuck they mapped all the neuron connections and… nope, the real innovative part of the story is clickbait
That’s only counting connections. The brain learns by making new connections, through complex location and timing dependent inputs from other neurons. It’s way more complex than the number of connections, and if neuroscientists are still studying the building blocks we don’t have much hope of recreating it.
This also ignores that the brain is not wholly an electrical system. The are all kinds of chemical receptors within the brain that alter all kinds of neurological function. Kid of the reason why drugs are a thing. On small scales we have a pretty good idea how these work, at least for the receptors that we're aware of. On larger scales it's mostly guessing at this point. The brain has a knack of doing more than the sum of all parts on a pretty regular basis.
Not to mention the scale and nature of the “dataset” that our brains were trained on. Millions of years of instinct encoded in DNA, plus a few years gathering data from dozens of senses 24/7 (including chemical receptors, like you said) and in turn manipulating our bodies, interacting with the environment, and observing the results. We’ve been doing all of this since embryo.
We can’t just feed a model raw image and text data and expect it’s intelligence to be comparable to ours. However you quantify intelligence/consciousness whatever, the text/image model’s thought processes will be alien to ours, which makes sense because their “environment” is nothing like ours - just text and image input and output.
A computer doesn’t need wet neurotransmitters. It can simulate node activation of all types pretty easily. It just needs to be trained on the proper models. The problem that we will face is choosing when we will believe it to be sentient versus following a complex series of patterns. At a certain point, we’ll have to remember that we are basically machines running in code as well. There will come a time when we will start to feel a moral obligation to grant AI citizenship.
Four grad students out there hand-entering NXML rows while squinting at AI enhanced SEM images should be able to get all 228T done by… next quarter, right?
This is setting aside that bus capacity is the bottleneck vs. compute power and they have yet to demonstrate bus performance of a full 228T connections/second with implicit timing which, to my knowledge, has never been demonstrated in a system a tiny fraction of this size. Though that’s not to say it’s impossible, but while this machine is incredibly powerful the comparison to human brains is predictably inaccurate…
Next I want to see a study of these annoying wellness progroms that take basic health info and then shove healthy behavior down your throat.
It took me a while to figure it out but I ignore all that crap now.
What I do think would actually be helpful is assistance buying health club memberships or exercise equipment. A bike helps me be healthier. Nagging does not.
Explaining what happens in a neural net is trivial. All they do is approximate (generally) nonlinear functions with a long series of multiplications and some rectification operations.
That isn't the hard part, you can track all of the math at each step.
The hard part is stating a simple explanation for the semantic meaning of each operation.
When a human solves a problem, we like to think that it occurs in discrete steps with simple goals: "First I will draw a diagram and put in the known information, then I will write the governing equations, then simplify them for the physics of the problem", and so on.
Neural nets don't appear to solve problems that way, each atomic operation does not have that semantic meaning. That is the root of all the reporting about how they are such 'black boxes' and researchers 'don't understand' how they work.
Yeah but most people don’t know this and have never looked. It seems way more complex to the layman than it is because instinctually we assume that anything that accomplishes great feats must be incredibly intricate
When a human solves a problem, we like to think that it occurs in discrete steps with simple goals: “First I will draw a diagram and put in the known information, then I will write the governing equations, then simplify them for the physics of the problem”, and so on.
I wonder how our brain even comes to formulate these steps in a way we can comprehend, the amount of neurons and zones firing on all cylinders seems tiring to imagine
@teft@BlackRose Watch Minority Report. There is a solution to your issue in that movie, but you're going to have to eat a moldy sandwich and possibly pee on the floor, if you lose the bathroom rope.
I know you’re joking, but nuclear fusion is inherently safe because if it breaks there is no way to sustain a chain reaction. And is only creates mildly radioactive byproducts. So you could blow it up and it wouldn’t seriously contaminate the area.
Not only are the radioactive byproducts not that dangerous (everything is relative of course). But also they have incredibly short half lives so they go away long before the firefighters turned up.
Technically fission has a similar physical barrier to infinite meltdown. Once the water leaves the core, the reaction stops. It was called China Syndrome, and we wouldn’t have worried about it at all, had the physicist that thought it up been a bit more competent with his math skills. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other ways that the reactors that we currently use can catastrophically fail.
At least they won’t be in danger of falling flat on the ground, halfway through their Big Words, due to muscle atrophy, the way every single other “first person on ______” is gonna have
“That’s one small trip and fall for a human, one giant faceplant for mankind.”
either because they hadn’t been offered them or because they didn’t take their company up on the offer
Are they talking about the "Get fired for depression" button on the company website that no one presses because entering in all your personal info is the oppsite of anonymous?
Ha. One time I started getting burned out at a job that was not what I expected and then got depressed, which made things even worse for me at work. Had never dealt with depression for and didn’t recognize it. But I figured it out before too long and entered treatment. Went to my boss and said hey I know my performance hasnt been as great as we hoped, turns out I’ve been depressed and I’m now getting help, already feeling better. Told them, I’m going to take a couple weeks of the (many weeks) of vacation time I had just to try and refresh a bit. The week before I left one of the bosses asked to review an assignment and then proceeded to give me like five rounds of extensive notes and markup. She had never done so before and in fact had the opposite problem, of not giving enough feedback. Well, obviously I didn’t have time to finish the assignment before I left because she had me changing things and then changing them back and then changing them again. I left the next day as scheduled and got on a plane. The day I returned to the office they fired me for not finishing the assignment, one month to the day I told them I was starting treating.
Especially if your company operates their wellness programs through a third-party (as they should), you are protected by HIPAA and numerous other regulations. You should make use of the mental health resources available or you are throwing away money or your own mental health due to paranoia. I use my company’s EAP all the time for counseling (autism, depression, anxiety, etc) and participate in the other wellness BS for the small cash rewards I get for doing so. I have not had an issue for well over half a decade, because the company would get maaaajorly sued for prying, and is actually incapable of doing so because these services are 3rd party.
My boss bought me pizza once! It wasn’t as good as the pizzas I used to buy myself, but who can afford non-work-pizza anymore?
I think work-pizza is making my teeth hurt, but my ex-dentist is all like “tell your job to pay me.”
Hey, do any of y’all wake up crying, too? My boss says it’s allergies in my home; my boss is so nice, they’ll even let me stay at work extra-long so I don’t have to deal with my home-allergies and they only need me to do extra work without telling anyone in exchange!
Anyway, I don’t love work-pizza, but it’s better than waking up crying!
Whoops! Another tooth fell out… I bet the new ones are gonna look beautiful when they grow back in like my boss said they will.
Oh wow! You think my writing is good enough that people might think I’m semi-literate??? Of all the replies I’ve ever received, this is definitely one of them, and I’ll likely sometimes remember it!
A supercomputer capable of simulating, at full scale, the synapses of a human brain is set to boot up in Australia next year, in the hopes of understanding how our brains process massive amounts of information while consuming relatively little power.
The machine, known as DeepSouth, is being built by the International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS) in Sydney, Australia, in partnership with two of the world’s biggest computer technology manufacturers,…
Intel and Dell. Unlike an ordinary computer, its hardware chips are designed to implement spiking neural networks, which model the way synapses process information in the brain.
Such neuromorphic computers, as they are known, have been built before, but DeepSouth will be the largest yet, capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, which is on par with the estimated number of synaptic operations in a human brain.
“For the first time we will be able to simulate the activity of a spiking neural network the size of the human brain in real time,” says Andre van Schaik at ICNS, who is leading the project. While DeepSouth won’t be more powerful than existing supercomputers, it will help advance our understanding of neuromorphic computing and biological brains, he says. “We need this ability to better learn how brains work and how they do what they do so well.”
Existing supercomputers are becoming one of the biggest consumers of energy on the planet, whereas a human brain uses barely more power than a light bulb. At least part of this difference is down to differing ways of processing data – traditional computers process information in fast sequence, constantly moving data between the processor and the memory, while a neuromorphic architecture performs many operations in parallel with significantly reduced movement of data. As the movement of data is one of the most power-hungry parts of the computation, the neuromorphic approach offers significant power savings.
In addition, spiking neural networks are event-driven, meaning the neuromorphic system responds to changes in input rather than continuous running in the background like a traditional computer, resulting in further power savings.
As well as potentially helping to build new types of computers, Ralph Etienne-Cummings at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who is not involved in the work, says DeepSouth will advance the study of neuroscience more quickly as he and other researchers will be able to repeatedly test models of the brain.
“If you are trying to understand the brain this will be the hardware to do it on,” he says. “At the end of the day there’s two types of researchers who will be interested in this – either those studying neuroscience or those who want to prototype new engineering solutions in the AI space.”
DeepSouth could pave the way for much higher energy efficiency in computing, says Etienne-Cummings, and if the technology can be miniaturised it will help make drones and robots more autonomous.
Not too long ago it would take a room like that to mimic a fraction of the power in my watch. Heck, I’ve got more power on my wrist than it took to get to the moon.
It’s a BangleJS. So, not super powerful, but I can program it myself and it has gps, gyro, Bluetooth, and two weeks of battery (assuming I’m not using that stuff constantly.)
Yup. One of those cards that plays a tune when you open it is more powerful than the Apollo computer. Apollo was only working on 4kb of RAM and 74kb of ROM.
If I had been in charge of figuring out how to make that work everyone would definitely be dead.
Those cards are more powerful than the watches I'm thinking of when people say "Casio nothing-watch", I think is what I was getting at. I'm thinking simple digital watches from the 80s/90s/2000s, kind of thing. As far as I know they have no real programmable logic, and anything that might be considered RAM is under 1KB.
But yeah those cards that actually play recorded samples are probably more powerful general computers than onboard Apollo, that's a good comparison.
Still, those computers and stuff like the Saturn instrument unit were freaking marvels, considering what all they could actually do with so little.
I’ve been hearing that quote about watches being more powerful since I was a child in the 80s. And I think it refers to processing speed - or even moreso, calculations per energy. Sure the watches may not have as much RAM/ROM, but they work fast enough to fully update every second, and do so using little enough power to last years on a coin cell.
To be fair our brain took millions of years of evolution, while this simulated brain took only a few years to be developed, maybe in the future this can all fit in a phone perhaps. Enough for this simulated brain to watch memes of beans from this era.
I think it’s overall a good thing if it helps laymen understand just how much privacy matters and how much can be gleaned from seemingly innocuous data online. If an “AI” label makes it hit home, cool. As long as they get it.
Yup, and plenty of people have no issues posting about local events or joining region/city specific groups, so it’s not exactly hard to put two and two together.
I don’t have much issue posting about the city I grew up in or former jobs, but generally work at being fairly vague about anything current
As is typical, this science reporting isn’t great. It’s not only that AI can do it effectively, but that it can do it at scale. To quote the paper:
“Despite these models achieving near-expert human performance, they come at a fraction of the cost, requiring 100× less financial and 240× lower time investment than human labelers—making such privacy violations at scale possible for the first time.”
They also demonstrate how interacting with an AI model can quickly extract more private info without looking like it is. A game of 20 questions, except you don’t realize you’re playing.
They propose "dark stars" which formed when dark matter clouds collapsed, the mass then pulls in hydrogen and helium. The resulting star is huge but it is a relatively cool star.
They believe they have found 3 candidates which could be galaxies (containing population III stars) or super massive dark stars.
The test is if they absorb or emit helium a helium signature. If they absorb it, they are dark stars if they emit helium they are galaxies.
The nice thing is there are only 2 proposed types of dark matter which could make a dark star work so it would help us work out what dark matter is.
newscientist.com
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