We still have no clue about the architecture of the human brain. Even if we did, it's not clear we need to replicate it.
My point is - even if we had, say, a million times more flops, and a million times more memory than the largest supercomputer today, we would still have no clue what to do with it. The problem is lack of algorithms, lack of theory, not lack of hardware.
We still have no clue about the architecture of the human brain. Even if we did, it's not clear we need to replicate it.
We do have a clue about the architecture of the human brain. Billions and billions of neurons with orders of magnitude more connections between them.
even if we had, say, a million times more flops, and a million times more memory
The point is that we could have those things but we don't have a million times lower memory latency and we don't have a million times more memory bandwidth. Those things haven't been improving at all for a very long time.
There are tons of algorithms we can think of that are completely infeasible on our current architectures due to the penalty we pay every time we have a cache miss. Simulating something like a human brain would be pretty well nothing but cache misses due to its massively parallel nature. It's not at all inconceivable to me that we already have the algorithm for general intelligence, we just don't have a big enough machine to run it fast enough.
We do have a clue about the architecture of the human brain. Billions and billions of neurons with orders of magnitude more connections between them.
You call this a "clue"? It's like saying that computer architecture is "Billions and billions of transistors with orders of magnitude more connections between them". Not gonna get very far with this knowledge.
...we don't have a million times lower memory latency and...
Ok, let's pretend we have an infinitely fast computer in every way, with infinite memory. No bottleneck of any kind.
What are you going to do with it, if your goal is to build AGI? What algorithms are you going to run? What are you going to simulate, if we don't know how a brain works? Not only we don't have "the algorithm for general intelligence", we don't even know if such an algorithm exists. It's far more likely that a brain is a collection of various specialized algorithms, or maybe something even more exotic/complex. Again, we have no clue. Ask any neuroscientist if you don't believe me.
>Ok, let's pretend we have an infinitely fast computer in every way, with infinite memory. No bottleneck of any kind. What are you going to do with it, if your goal is to build AGI?
We know how to make AI given infinite computing power. That's not really hard. You can solve tons of problems with infinite computing power. All of the real work is optimizing it to work within resource constraints.
Yes, I've been just thinking about it, and even without looking at your link, it's easy to see how to build (find) AGI given an infinitely fast computer.
My point is - even if we had, say, a million times more flops, and a million times more memory than the largest supercomputer today, we would still have no clue what to do with it. The problem is lack of algorithms, lack of theory, not lack of hardware.