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Well, Wikipedia was my source [0] and it links http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/ as its source.

Google has TPU that are off from the estimated power required to simulate a brain by a factor of 3, so technology is reaching the ballpark. Given that brains were evolved, the part that does symbolic thinking is probably "easy to stumble on" in some practical sense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders...

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Faster hardware will help, but I'm not convinced that it's the answer. OpenAI Five used on the order of 2000 years of experience to train their agent. There are clearly still huge algorithmic gains to be had.

Given how we've managed to improve on nature in other domains (see solar cell efficiency, for example), I think that if we can figure out how intelligent organisms manage to learn so quickly we can likely beat nature's efficiency.

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