Comment by api

Makes me wonder if the brain just does it with brute force.

The neocortex would be akin to something like a 100T neural network, and that’s with the maybe overly reductionist assumption that only synapses are doing anything when there’s a lot of biology happening in there. Every cell is filled with its own computation and state. It could be closer to a 10E model if all that is in play.

The neocortex is nowhere near the whole brain.

Architecturally the brain could be described as a slow but ultra-wide machine with colocated memory and thus an effectively enormous memory bandwidth. That lets it evaluate its whole parameter set continuously.

I keep thinking the brain must be algorithmically doing something super clever but maybe not. Maybe old mother nature just found the “bitter lesson.” Maybe it’s algorithmically inefficient and messy but there’s just a whole lot of it.