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by mlyle 1676 days ago
> I'm curious how we're even going to manage 420,000 pixels' worth (60,000 ommatidia, approximately 7 pixels each) of input with only a few hundred transistors, let alone do vector analysis on it.

If you define the problem as importing 420,000 pixels, and target recognitions, and vector analysis, then you need a whole lot more computation than the organism uses. But presumably you're going to also get better results. We both know that's not exactly what's happening, I think.

That is, we know we can solve similar tracking problems with a whole lot less state.

> That's pretending 99.7% of the seven thousand synapses each neuron has are useless for our purpose

Not really... I think we can imagine a whole lot of passives / linear operations involved, along with the big nonlinear processes we need transistors for.

We're also assuming there's no net benefit to cognition that can happen using transistors, I'll note-- e.g. they have a ton of bandwidth compared to neurons, can be multiplexed more readily, etc....

> Humans have 86 billion neurons. Subtracting 22 gives us 64 billion, times 20 transistors per neuron gives us 1.28 trillion transistors.

So about half the number packed onto Cerebras WSE-2 today.

> even pretending we exactly understood how sapience worked in the first place.

This is the big problem.