[simonh]

I’ve seen this claimed before. I think it’s based on an estimation of the computational sophistication of the human brain. Not what’s required to perfectly simulate a brain as such, much of the activity in brain cells is likely metabolic and not tied to their relevant behaviour, but what’s required to replicate the brain’s cognitive activity.

We may know little to nothing about AGI, but we do have one very common example of GI abundantly available to use as a point of reference.

I’m not sure what estimation the poster is using though, or how likely it might be to be accurate.

[s1dechnl]

You are correct. You don't need to do a whole brain simulation to achieve AGI. Instead, you need to understand an incredible amount about its processes, design, and overall nature. At which point, you need to translate this into the computational domain. A lot can be 'left on the table' so to speak. The fundamental problem arises with how deep your understanding is so as to know which parts you can leave on the table and which parts you can't. As far as then putting this into a functional computational system, you would need an extensive knowledge in this domain as well so as to know how to structure the software to best exploit the hardware. Lots of prototypes, performance testing, scaling, etc until you have a sound 'feel' of what you can expect and where things and you need to go. That being said.. Yes, I can run my stack on a consumer grade CPU/GPU. I have designs for hardware architectures that don't quite exist yet but all of that can be emulated in software. Latency is the only consequence of current hardware which can be trimmed with effort. Latency when too high can be abstracted with time scaled simulation. So, there is absolutely no blocker in hardware for developing AGI and yes it can be done on affordable consumer hardware .. If GPUs don't continue to be resigned to ponzi schemes and RAM prices come back to earth. That being said, if I need to, and if things don't change down the road, I'd be more than happy to spin my own hardware to keep costs in order.