IBM 'TrueNorth' Neuro-Synaptic Chip Promises Huge Changes -- Eventually

JakartaDean writes: Each of IBM's "TrueNorth" chips contains 5.4 billion transistors and runs on 70 milliwatts. The chips are designed to behave like neurons—the basic building blocks of biological brains. Dharmenda Modha, the head of IBM's cognitive computing group, says a system of 24 connected chips simulates 48 million neurons, roughly the same number rodents have.

Whereas conventional chips are wired to execute particular "instructions," the TrueNorth juggles "spikes," much simpler pieces of information analogous to the pulses of electricity in the brain. Spikes, for instance, can show the changes in someone's voice as they speak—or changes in color from pixel to pixel in a photo. "You can think of it as a one-bit message sent from one neuron to another." says one of the chip's chief designers. The chips are designed well not for training neural networks, but for executing them. This has significant implications for consumer AI: big companies with lots of resources could focus on the training, which individual TrueNorth chips in people's gadgets could handle the execution.

Comments

Re:What Happens When One Transistor Goes Rogue?

[NotQuiteReal]

You can lose a significant part of your brain yet change in cognitive abilities will be barely noticeable.

I'll drink to that!

Re: Correction to summary

[mbeckman]

IBM is not simulating a rodent brain. They're not even simulating neurons, since nobody knows how neurons work. And IBM isn't claiming to, despite the lie in Wired's headline. Some AI scientist simply hope that they don't have to know how neurons or brains work, because if they just put enough not-neurons in a not-brain network, that magically, intelligence will emerge. It's like putting a barrel of nuts and bolts in a spinning cement mixer and hoping a car emerges, or maybe a bicycle. But billions of times less likely.

Re:What Happens When One Transistor Goes Rogue?

[Archtech]

It never ceases to amuse and baffle me how even intelligent, educated Americans (such as slashdotters) allow themselves to be lured into vicious "Republican-Democrat" battles. Isn't it obvious that Demoblicans and Republicrats are just the two hands of the same power? Every minute and every quantum of attention and passion you devote to slanging off the "other" party is a minute and a quantum of attention wasted; because the American political circus has been carefully set up so that neither party can ever win decisively. Instead, you attentively watch a series of more or less random fluctuations in fortune, and whip yourself up into a rage about the character defects of the other party's politicians, all the while ignoring the psychopaths in your own chosen party. And you will never succeed in changing the government's policies by any exercise of your votes - just look at what Obama promised before BOTH of his elections, and how he gave you Dubya's third and fourth terms when you kindly elected him.

When will we see a serious discussion on Slashdot about the underlying political system that controls both parties, and excludes everyone else? Why doesn't anyone seem to care about the impossibility of voting for a political leader who doesn't want to conduct genocidal foreign wars? How about a government that reins in the banks and declines to follow the orders of billionaires? Why don't any of you seem even slightly interested in government of the people, by the people, for the people? (In case you hadn't noticed, what you currently have is government of the people, by the servants of the rich, for the rich).