Scientists announce a new 'organoid intelligence' field
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
The article is about neurons, but they are fascinating in cancer research also. You can grow fibroblasts together with cancer cells and they start making something like a real tumor and start exhibiting responses more like in vivo tumors. My favorite way to grow them was just seed the cells in special plates that the cells don't want to attach to and they just start attaching to one another and start making a colony of self-organizing cells floating in the media.
A good overview here-
https://cancerci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12935-0...
>using primarily biological sequence data
I was wondering about that bit.
Those who are straying from gods light the fastest are firmly in the shadows.
Quantization is black magic of the software variety that seems to be able to significantly reduce that without a commensurate loss in quality, though the results are a little subjective. Some well reviewed quantizations of 7B models can get them below 9GB.
Witty comment aside, the human brain is pretty efficient in terms of energy use considering it's taking in a ton of data while it's conscious. Two each audio and video streams, olfactory, gustatory, touch, vestibular, and all the interoception. Inference and training in real time. All for the low price of 125 watts, a quarter that if you're just measuring the brain and not the whole body.
The paper was published last year. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.338...
I'm not convinced this field will outpace silicon or whatever succeeds it, considering how big the semiconductor industry is.
I'm not sure I'd call this machine efficient at using its computational power.
I know this was in jest, but if sleep was not a critical biological process we would have evolved to not do it already
I think this is pretty trivially untrue, it's just a very different sort of knowledge.
On the one hand, we have tiny, artifical lumps of vat-grown neurons, that lack any self-awareness, emotions or even basic pain reception (because, you know, you kinda need a whole sensory apparatus for this).
On the other hand, we have living, breathing, feeling beings with complex social and emotional lives, capable of experiencing joy, sadness, horror, panic, friendship and attachment. Oh, and they absolutely can feel pain. Also known as pigs, cows, chickens and other vertebrate farm animals.
Now, humanity kills about 80 billion such farm animals per year. [1]
So how do the "many thorny ethical knots" compare to that if I may ask?
Ostensibly, those animals are killed for sustenance, where lab intelligences will be created, poked , prodded, altered and killed merely for fun or curiosity. Even if we disagree on the ethics of eating meat, hopefully we at least agree that there's a meaningful difference there, especially since we don't know where the boundary of "basic pain reception", or indeed any kind of experience, truly lies.
So really people like me who eat meat are guilty two sins -- eating intelligent creatures that don't need to be eaten and destroying the planet by doing so.
also, don't underplay the utility of this kind of research, people don't just do it for funsies, they do it because it could change the world.
Eating meat is just.... greed.
With the many alternative food sources we have available to meet our needs for sustenance (which are also less wasteful and more climate-friendly) it is hard to argue that these animals die for anything but to keep up our eating habits or simply for the pleasure of eating them.
As sad as it may be, we don't live in a world where each and every human on earth today can go and eat a serving of tofu. There isn't enough soybean grown and distributed around the world for that to happen. Stop eating meat tomorrow and a huge portion of the world doesn't just eat soybean that doesn't yet exist, they starve, or they eat meat that currently exists and is produced by large systems that individuals are powerless to shape. Overtime we can strive for change, but to expect immediate action and blame selfish pleasure and not the complexity of reorienting the entire worlds food supply is a bit naive.
Given that meat production accounts for >15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, this is literally what is happening.
> There isn't enough soybean grown and distributed around the world for that to happen.
Excuse me, where do you think all the calories we feed livestock comes from? Despite what greenwashing pictures on meat-packets try to tell people, we don't grow 80 Billion pieces of livestock anually by letting them graze peacefully on fresh green pastures in wide open plains.
Instead we waste truly vast areas of land growing maize, soybean and grain, aka. foodstuffs that are completely fit for human consumption, which then get sold as feedstock, to go into one of the most nonsensical wastes of resources in history. Just as an example of how absurd this is: The energy efficiency for beef production is 25:1, meaning you need 25 calories of feedstock, to make 1 calorie worth of beef. And again, these are 25 calories of things humans could eat.
For comparisons sake: The energy differential between LED and incandescant bulbs is merely 1:10. No one argues whether we should use LED or incadescant bulbs any more, but somehow for meat and it's much worse ratio this is still somehow up for discussion?
So yes, we do absolutely produce enough calories from growing plants alone, to feed every single person on this planet. In fact we could feed many more people, and have way less problems, if we didn't waste mountains of maize, soybeans, grain and other valueable foodstuffs, by force-feeding them to animals.
I am however, more than happy to eat any number of products that contain corn in various other forms. Because, you know, "feed corn" is just, well, corn, and instead of feeding it to animals, we can give it to humans instead.
> Still, that soybean has a long way to go before its a brick of tofu wrapped in plastic sitting on your grocery store shelf.
That cow has a long way to go before its a bag of meat on a grocery shelf as well. And that way wasted ALOT more energy and resources than the way my Tofu block does.
No, it really doesn't. It's a conscious decision of society that we produce, and consume, a lot of meat.
As I have repeatedly demonstrated in this thread, a huge amount of the calories we put into the production of meat, come from human consumable foodstuffs. We have the production facilities to turn these grains and beans into flour, bread, tofu, canned beans, whatever. We do it every day, on an industrial scale.
We could do so any time to these feedstocks as well. The technology exists, the facilities exist, the infrastructure exists, the supply chain exists.
Processes have to be adapted,for sure and that will take time. But that is not, I think, the limiting factor at the moment. The limiting factor is our appetite for animals.
You can make an argument that we don't have to eat as many animals as we do, but you simply can't make the argument that we shouldn't eat animals at all.
And what does "Study after Study" say about the overconsumption of meat so common especially in western societies these days?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26780279/
Feel free to browse through the "similar articles" section under the linked study.
> Healthy vegetarian diets are still the domain of the economically and educationally privileged.
For most people in the world, especially outside of comparatively rich western societies, meat is actually a costly alternative, and plant based foodstuffs are the norm.
Even if we accepted that this somehow makes the ethical conundrum of killing beings that can feel all the pain, horror, fear, terror and dispair thus inflicted, despite having more than enough alternative food sources available to us, magically disappear...
...different studies indicate that western households waste ~1/5th of the food they buy. So, simplifying of course, this would mean that ~16 Billion creatures, who feel pain just as much as humans do, are killed every year ... just so we can throw their rotten carcasses in the garbage.
> hopefully we at least agree that there's a meaningful difference there
Oh, absolutely, only I guess not in the sense that you think we do.
Because these vat-grown lumps of neurons don't feel. They are not conscious. They don't experience pain. Even simple E.Coli bacteria grown on an Agar-Medium have more resemblance to life than they do, because the bacteria at least are beings fully capable of existing outside of a lab-provided growth medium.
So yes, there is a difference: Probing around in lab grown lumps is research, and killing billions of conscious beings so they can then rot in our garbage bins is morally indefensible.
Being conscious is not a prerequisite for them feeling something as far as we know, and you simply don't know that it doesn't feel anything.
I agree that food waste is an issue that requires better education, as does nutrition in general. Then again, nutrition research has been abysmal until only very recently, so people have been getting confusing messages for decades now.
Yes, I do know that, because I know that pain reception requires nociceptors [1].
In fact all bodily sensory information requires a periphery of sensory neurons. The central nervous system itself, is simply incapable to collect sensory information on its own.
And our complex emotional lives are the result of a developmental process that involves pathway selection by usage patterns.
None of these things are present in a lump of cells in a growth medium.
Is there a qualitative difference between an LLM looking up the temperature on the internet (or getting it from an attached thermometer) and an animal brain receiving it from a thermoreceptor? The latter may be more integrated, but it sounds functionally identical to me.
Add numbers, no of course not, write a book though…
251MJ is what 2000kcal diet for a month works out to. That’s also 2.5kW for 100 servers for 1000 seconds.
Is it true that a human would write a better book in a month than a well-designed algorithm?
Maybe.
The "well designed" plays a big role in this sentence. At some point you're just writing the book with a different "pen".
Somewhere in there there's some efficiencies being achieved that come from being functionally active in ways that it don't make for an easy one to one comparison to transistors.
But what I'm saying is, there is a layer (or layers) of organic function that is abstracted away in machine learning/AI. While the field does borrow ideas liberally from brain architecture (as it well should), you nevertheless have neurons doing things like chemical signalling, metabolic regulation, unique site-specific structural organization, and processes for dynamic reorganization of structure as needed.
That is, not just in the informational representation, which can be sufficiently abstract to model practically anything, but in the hardware itself upon which the information rests. It's there that I suspect there are efficiencies gained by brains over transistors.
In particular the human brain is an 80-billion core processor with each core running at 300Hz. Its architecture is not so good at FLOPs and other things we typically use computers for, but overall human brains dramatically outperform anything in 2024 except the world's fastest supercomputer.
Meaning at specific tasks, right? Because obviously even the weakest modern computers out perform humans at certain kinds of tasks.
No, they are really not.
A Neuron on its own is capable of exactly one thing, and that's signal integration from it's dendrites. That's it. Wait until the excitation potential reaches the point where the Potassium channels switch and boum: Signal cascade goes down the axon.
The only moderation a single neuron is capable of, is varying signal resistance to filter out repeating noise.
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i...
Computational complexity doesn't indicate computational capability.
There are any number of systems that stubbornly refuse to be capable supercomputers, despite being incredibly hard to simulate.
Accurately simulating every aspect of the liquid flow through an acorn leaf, with it's billions of micro and nanometer channels, would easily be one of the most difficult tasks in the history of computing, and yet, acorn leaves are not even capable of the simplest thought, and the entire modus operandi of water flow through an entire tree can be accurately summarized in a simple 1-page diagram.
Every single muscle fiber with its trillions of moving cytoskeleton components, has a much higher complexity than a neuron, that doesn't mean muscles are supercomputers.