zlacker

>>treebr+(OP)
A really simple approach we took while I was working on a research team at Microsoft for predicting when AGI would land was simply estimating at what point can we run a full simulation of all of the chemical processes and synapses inside a human brain.

The approach was tremendously simple and totally naive, but it was still interesting. At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm. We then simply applied a Moore's law-esque approach of assuming simulation capacity can double every 1.5-2 years (I forget the time period we used), and mapped out different animals that we had the capability to simulate on each date. We showed years for a field mouse, a corvid, a chimp, and eventually a human brain. The date we landed on was 2047.

There are so many things wrong with that approach I can't even count, but I'd be kinda smitten if it ended up being correct.

>>jjcm+ne
Another approach: the adult human brain has 100 (+- 20) billion or 10^11 neurons. Each neuron has 10^3 synapses and each synapse has 10^2 ion channels, amounts to 10^16 total channels. Assuming 10 parameters is enough to represent each channel (unlikely), that's about 10^17 (100 quadrillion) total parameters. Compare that to GPT4 which is rumored to be about 1.7*10^12 parameters on 8x 80GB A100s.

log(10^17/10^12)/log(2) = 16.61 so assuming 1.5 years per doubling, that'll be another 24.9 years - December, 2048 - before 8x X100s can simulate the human brain.