Obviously if you increase the speed of a mouse brain, you'll just get a fast mouse brain. But that's not how an artificial neural net works. If it clocks at 1 GHz, it can sequentially process a million different connections and still get 1 kHz overall refresh rate. The idea is that you have a neural processing unit, and an external memory, and you load a small section of the parameters and state from memory, process it, and write it back, and then process the next section.
use the timing of of incoming pulses to decide when and whether they should fire
You can encode the timing of the pulses in a number, and then process it synchronously for exactly the same effect. The big advantage of artificial nets is that you're not restricted to pulses.
given the enormous metabolic costs of a brain, there's probably very little actual duplication being done
Given the slow processing frequency of neurons, and the sheer amount of information that needs to be processed, it has to be done in parallel. If something is moving in the corner of your eye, you need to know right away in which corner. This is only possible if you make multiple little movement detector areas, each connected to a section of the retina. An artificial net only needs the parameters for one of them, and can then sequentially scan the entire vision area.
There's no home machine that can even achieve its warm up cycle in 2 minutes
Sure, but I'm not going to sit next to the coffee machine waiting for it to warm up. I cook my breakfast, pack my bag, fix my hair, check my e-mail or a half dozen other things, and in the meantime make a cup of coffee.
the best way to get rich is to get lucky and start a company at the right time
Starting a company requires money. Even a modest amount like $10k can make a huge difference in chance of success. A lot of people could easily save up $10k in a few years just by being frugal.
A good certified drip brewer that brews fast enough to not make the coffee bitter easily costs a couple of hundred for the cheap models.
I paid $25 for mine, and the coffee tastes great. Not bitter at all. The speed depends mainly on the wattage of the heater element and the size of the holes in the bottom, neither of which requires expensive materials.
In 2015 Digital Reasoning built the largest neural network in the world, at 160 billion parameters. I'm guessing a "parameter" is a weighted connection between "neurons", and thus roughly analogous to a single synapse in an organic brain,
I think it's a bit more complicated. Natural brains are very slow. I think the fastest neurons run at about 1 kHz, whereas artificial networks run at multiple GHz. Also, real brains have a lot of duplicated circuitry. Simple example is image processing for your left and right eyes. An artificial net can re-use the same parameters for different parts of the data.
I think a better method is to compare basic operations per second, i.e. number of synapses multiplied by "refresh rate"
the system should have some representation of "concepts" in order to be considered intelligent
It does. AlphaGo has representations of Go concepts. It can look at a board, and immediately get a feel for who is better, and what would be good places to play next. It internally represents concepts like space, territory, initiative, and probably a few that human players don't even have names for.
It's also not a brute-force calculator. It only tries out a very small subset of all possible moves, namely only the ones that "pop out" as good candidate moves.
I presume you don't have a daughter between 4 and 10 years old
My daughter is 18, and I've never heard of a "Barbie Dreamhouse". When she was younger, she had dolls and even a plastic play house for them, but they were all cheap generic toys.
As a parent, I never had problems with my kids wanting expensive items. I have always maintained a limited budget for birthday and christmas gifts. If they really wanted something that was exceeding the budget, I would give them the budget amount in cash, and then they could save up the rest themselves. Sometimes we would tell the grandparents to give cash too, so they could combine all of it.
Bitcoin is analogous to gold, except like you point out, is intrinsically worthless.
Gold is almost intrinsically worthless. Most of its value is contextual, just like bitcoin. Gold's value as an excellent conductor is valuable in the context of electronics where such properties are desired. It's not particularly valuable when you're out in the desert, looking for some water.
You can't compare a stock like AAPL or MSFT to something like Bitcoin.
I wasn't trying to claim they are equivalent. I was merely pointing out that the early investor can make a disproportionate amount of profit on a growing asset, and that this property is not enough to call something a pyramid scheme.
You cannot celebrate the absurd valuations BTC has right now
Market cap is $200 billion. The market cap for gold is $7 trillion. Bitcoin is easier to trade, has proof of authenticity and can be arbitrarily divided and combined. One could argue that it should be more valuable than gold.
If you think current valuation is absurd, what should the price be ? And using the same logic what's a reasonable price for gold ?
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you wouldn't sell at market price.
For these kinds of amounts, it's probably better to do a direct trade with an investment fund or other rich person who wants to get in.
Obviously if you increase the speed of a mouse brain, you'll just get a fast mouse brain. But that's not how an artificial neural net works. If it clocks at 1 GHz, it can sequentially process a million different connections and still get 1 kHz overall refresh rate. The idea is that you have a neural processing unit, and an external memory, and you load a small section of the parameters and state from memory, process it, and write it back, and then process the next section.
use the timing of of incoming pulses to decide when and whether they should fire
You can encode the timing of the pulses in a number, and then process it synchronously for exactly the same effect. The big advantage of artificial nets is that you're not restricted to pulses.
unlike the "dumb switches" in a NN
They aren't so dumb anymore. Just some simple examples of modern development:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.060...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
given the enormous metabolic costs of a brain, there's probably very little actual duplication being done
Given the slow processing frequency of neurons, and the sheer amount of information that needs to be processed, it has to be done in parallel. If something is moving in the corner of your eye, you need to know right away in which corner. This is only possible if you make multiple little movement detector areas, each connected to a section of the retina. An artificial net only needs the parameters for one of them, and can then sequentially scan the entire vision area.
There's no home machine that can even achieve its warm up cycle in 2 minutes
Sure, but I'm not going to sit next to the coffee machine waiting for it to warm up. I cook my breakfast, pack my bag, fix my hair, check my e-mail or a half dozen other things, and in the meantime make a cup of coffee.
the best way to get rich is to get lucky and start a company at the right time
Starting a company requires money. Even a modest amount like $10k can make a huge difference in chance of success. A lot of people could easily save up $10k in a few years just by being frugal.
And sit at a cramped table in uncomfortable chairs.
A good certified drip brewer that brews fast enough to not make the coffee bitter easily costs a couple of hundred for the cheap models.
I paid $25 for mine, and the coffee tastes great. Not bitter at all. The speed depends mainly on the wattage of the heater element and the size of the holes in the bottom, neither of which requires expensive materials.
AI neural networks are generally arranged in layers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I wonder if they are exploiting the massive amounts of data Google can access
No, they are using a standardised dataset, just like everybody else.
It just shows a table with several objects, and asks questions like "What number of other things are there of the same material as the green cube ?"
There is no optical illusion.
In 2015 Digital Reasoning built the largest neural network in the world, at 160 billion parameters. I'm guessing a "parameter" is a weighted connection between "neurons", and thus roughly analogous to a single synapse in an organic brain,
I think it's a bit more complicated. Natural brains are very slow. I think the fastest neurons run at about 1 kHz, whereas artificial networks run at multiple GHz. Also, real brains have a lot of duplicated circuitry. Simple example is image processing for your left and right eyes. An artificial net can re-use the same parameters for different parts of the data.
I think a better method is to compare basic operations per second, i.e. number of synapses multiplied by "refresh rate"
Not buying anything you don't need is how you save up money. And having money is very helpful when you want to get rich.
the system should have some representation of "concepts" in order to be considered intelligent
It does. AlphaGo has representations of Go concepts. It can look at a board, and immediately get a feel for who is better, and what would be good places to play next. It internally represents concepts like space, territory, initiative, and probably a few that human players don't even have names for.
It's also not a brute-force calculator. It only tries out a very small subset of all possible moves, namely only the ones that "pop out" as good candidate moves.
It can identify if something is a kitten or not with 83.4% accuracy. Sounds impressive until you realize a 3 year old can do this with 99.9% accuracy.
How many 3 year olds can tell the difference between a komondor and a bouvier des flanders ? Or would they simply classify both as "dog" ?
Here you can test yourself on some of these images:
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/...
Try the hard ones.
I presume you don't have a daughter between 4 and 10 years old
My daughter is 18, and I've never heard of a "Barbie Dreamhouse". When she was younger, she had dolls and even a plastic play house for them, but they were all cheap generic toys.
As a parent, I never had problems with my kids wanting expensive items. I have always maintained a limited budget for birthday and christmas gifts. If they really wanted something that was exceeding the budget, I would give them the budget amount in cash, and then they could save up the rest themselves. Sometimes we would tell the grandparents to give cash too, so they could combine all of it.
The progress in AI is in re-defining it.
The progress is in getting better results, and solving increasingly challenging problems that could not be solved before.
Nobody knows how or whether human brains create intelligence.
If you have no idea how it works, how come you feel qualified to make strong statements about it ?
So human intelligence is also a sum of narrow AIs? All that means is that your definitions don't match anyone else's.
It matches mine. Actually you could go a step further: human intelligence is also a sum of stupid parts.
Try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
AI outperforms humans. There are some tricky cases after timestamp 2:42. You may want to try them for yourself.
A 3 year old would still be able to outperform it
Really ? Have you seen any test results of a 3 year old on ImageNET challenges, or are you just making it up ?
ELIZA only ever was a natural language processing computer program
No it wasn't. It was just manipulating bits in memory. There was no concept of language.
Bitcoin is analogous to gold, except like you point out, is intrinsically worthless.
Gold is almost intrinsically worthless. Most of its value is contextual, just like bitcoin. Gold's value as an excellent conductor is valuable in the context of electronics where such properties are desired. It's not particularly valuable when you're out in the desert, looking for some water.
You can't compare a stock like AAPL or MSFT to something like Bitcoin.
I wasn't trying to claim they are equivalent. I was merely pointing out that the early investor can make a disproportionate amount of profit on a growing asset, and that this property is not enough to call something a pyramid scheme.
You cannot celebrate the absurd valuations BTC has right now
Market cap is $200 billion. The market cap for gold is $7 trillion. Bitcoin is easier to trade, has proof of authenticity and can be arbitrarily divided and combined. One could argue that it should be more valuable than gold.
If you think current valuation is absurd, what should the price be ? And using the same logic what's a reasonable price for gold ?