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by wildermuthn 622 days ago
Biology is an organic computation that runs at the speed of existence. There may be no way to simulate this computation in silicon at the same scale, insofar as biology is already massively parallel and may very well involve quantum computation.

Put another way, if we accept for a moment that the universe is a simulation, it may be fundamentally impossible for an in-simulation simulator to ever reach the computational power of its parent simulator.

2 comments

Lots of biological processes are indeed parallel but that doesn't mean they are all different. Once the most important ones are understood we can reasonably simulate how biology works. Just like you can simulate a much more complex CPU on a lower end CPU - just at a reduced clock speed.
So what you're saying is, the most efficient AI is not a data center of GPUs, it's... a giant tank of lab-grown brains.
There's an entire field called Biological Computing which studies precisely that (not AI, more around general purpose computing).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing

As a counter to my original thought, perhaps simulating the computation of a skull-sized organic system is possible by building an earth-sized silicon system.
>So what you're saying is, the most efficient AI is not a data center of GPUs, it's... a giant tank of lab-grown brains.

That's literally what a think tank is.

Or a research university, for that matter. The labs are where our brains grow.

They didn’t say that at all. It seems like you wanted to say it.