[willow8349]

Look at the power draw of the human brains versus any of the hardware running these models. It’s an order of magnitude difference. Often multiple orders of magnitude.

Part of the reason is a massive focus on GPUs and digital techniques. Some things like math operations are quite fast and accurate to do in a discrete sense when that matters.

The human brain is not discrete though. Nor is it really fully analog.

Specialized hardware beyond GPUs for parallel digital calculations will likely be needed to implement architectures that get actually closer to human levels of intelligence.

[davidktr]

Deep down the brain is 100% discrete: Neurons are either firing or not. To me, the brain's biggest mistery is how it goes from this to doing all the analogue stuff, and ends up with our capacity to deal with symbols.

[montereynack]

Sorry, but this is untrue; action potentials in neurons have extremely complex interplay with each other, including residual “soft” periods and chemically-induced changes in how they fire. Neurons don’t just “fire” or “not fire”, they adaptively change the strength of their firing constantly, unpredictably and continuously.

[RetroTechie]

Yes, and there's things like feedback / reflection, self-modifying like behaviour, lossy memory, emotional state, tiredness, aging, loads of drugs & hormones to influence the process, etc, etc.

Buuuttt... it's possible that few if any of those things are needed to capture the essence of a brains' functionality.

Maybe it's simply a matter of size. Maybe some configuration tweaks. Perhaps a different architecture.

We simply don't know - yet.

[sublinear]

> few if any of those things are needed to capture the essence of a brains' functionality

I'm pretty sure all those things being dismissed are the essence of a brain.