Comment by cruffle_duffle
6 months ago
“And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and several KW to run.”
I’ve always thought about nature didn’t evolve to use electricity as its primary means of energy. Instead it uses chemistry. It’s quite curious, really.
Like a tiny insect is chemistry powered. It doesn’t need to recharge batteries, it needs to eat and breathe oxygen.
What if our computers started to use biology and chemistry as their primary energy source?
Or will it be the case that in the end using electricity as the primary energy source is more efficient for “human brain scale computation”, it’s just that nature didn’t evolve that way…
"Wetware" as it were , i remeber some research article some time back where they grew some kind of 'brainlets' and had them functional as far as memory was concerned[1]. Would be a interesting to see how that tech would progress while incororatd in the current silicon/photonic devices for input/output. Downside would be the durability of the organic matter and replacement.
[1] https://sciencesensei.com/scientists-created-thinking-brain-...
>Downside would be the durability of the organic matter and replacement.
thinking about the consequences of consumer grade "organic computing" gets weird really fast. How do you interface biological matter with peripherals? What about toxicity? What about pathogens? Not only as targets, but as vectors too. What about senescence? Would my computer catch a cold or get Alzheimer's? What about energy? Would I have to buy proteins/sugar for my PC? Would a "beefy PC master race" kind of machine big enough to gain sentience? Would my PC need to literally sleep?!
Funny to think about it
I always thought optical signalling would be a interesting i/o pathway being non intrusive in HumanComputer interaction - rather than electrical signalling probes ala neuralink.
Yeah and sentience open a whole new can of ethical/moral implications to sort through.