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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

ELI5: Could you explain what neuromorphic approaches mean, and how they contribute to AI/AGI? My first impression as a layperson (probably wrong) is that this approach resembles ideas from the book "The Society of the Mind", where the system isn't just simulating neurons but involves a variety of methods and interactions across "agents" or sub-systems.

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Neuromorphic mostly just means "like how the brain works". It encompasses a variety of software & hardware approaches.

The most compelling and obvious one to me is hardware purpose-built to simulate spiking neural networks. In the happy case, SNNs are extremely efficient. Basically consuming no energy. You could fool yourself into thinking we can just do this on the CPU due to the sparsity of activations. I think there is even a set of problems this works well for. But, in the unhappy cases SNNs are impossible to simulate on existing hardware. Neuronal avalanches follow power law distribution and meaningfully-large ones would require very clever techniques to simulate with any reasonable fidelity.

> the system isn't just simulating neurons but involves a variety of methods and interactions across "agents" or sub-systems.

I think the line between "neuron" and "agent" starts to get blurry in this arena.

We somehow want a network that is neuromorphic in structure but we don't want it to be like the brain and take 20 years or more to train?

Secondly how do we get to claim that a particular thing is neuromorphic when we have such a rudimentary understanding of how a biological brain works or how it generates things like a model of the world, understanding of self etc etc.

Something to consider is that it really could take 20+ years to train like a brain. But once you’ve trained it, you can replicate at ~0 cost, unlike a brain.

> we don't want it to be like the brain and take 20 years or more to train?

Estimates put training of gpt4 at something like 2500 gpu years to train, over about 10000 gpus. 20 years would be a big improvement.

1 GPU year is in no way comparable to 1 chronological year of learning for a human brain though.

Yes, but the underlying point is that in this case you can train the AI in parallel, and there's a decent chance this or something like it will be true for future AI architectures too. What does it matter that the AI needs to be trained on 20 years of experiences if all of those 20 years can be experienced in 6 months given the right hardware?

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I understand you, but what if the type of learning that leads to intelligence is inherently serial in some important way and can't just be parallelized? What if the fact that it takes a certain amount of chronological time is important? etc

What I'm trying to express is we seem to want to cherry pick certain features from nature but ignore others that are inconvenient and that is understandable, but currently because our knowledge of the biological systems is so incomplete we really don't know which (if any) of these features gives rise to intelligence. For all we know we could be doing training in a seemingly-efficient way that completely precludes intelligence actually emerging.

My take, for pragmatic reasons rather than how the brain actually works, is that an agent-based architecture is great because some tasks can be solved more effectively by specific algorithms or workflows rather than operating at the low level of neural networks (NN).

Neuromorphic has been an ongoing failure (for general purpose processors or even AI accelerators), ever since Carver Mead introduced (and quickly abandoned them) them nearly half a century ago. Bill Dally (NVidia CTO) concurs: "I keep getting those calls from those people who claim they are doing neuromorphic computing and they claim there is something magical about it because it's the way that the brain works ... but it's truly more like building an airplane by putting feathers on it and flapping with the wings!" From: Hardware for Deep Learning, HotChips 2023 keynote.

We have NO idea how the brain produces intelligence, and as long as that doesn't change, "neuromorphic" is merely a marketing term, like Neurotypical, Neurodivergent, Neurodiverse, Neuroethics, Neuroeconomics, Neuromarketing, Neurolaw, Neurosecurity, Neurotheology, Neuro-Linguistic Programming: the "neuro-" prefix is suggesting a deep scientific insight to fool the audience. There is no hope of us cracking the question of how the human brain produces high-level intelligence in the next decade or so.

Neuromorphic does work for some special purpose applications.

I like the feather analogy. Early on all humans knew about flight was from biology (watching birds fly) but trying to make a flying machine modeled after a bird would never work. We can fly today but plane designs are nothing like biological flying machines. In the same way, all we know about intelligence comes from biology and trying to invent an AGI modeled on biological intelligence may be just as impossible as a plane designed around how birds fly.

/way out of my area of expertise here

And it's only now, having built our own different kind of flying machine, that we understand the principles of avian flight well enough to build our own ornithopters. (We don't use ornithopters because they're not practical, but we've known how to build them since the 1960s.) We would have never gotten here had we just continued to try to blindly copy birds.

I love this book and have it sitting on my shelf right now! Read it when I was a kid and was amazed at the ideas in it, nowadays it's clearer to me that the author only had a grasp of how things like that would be built but still cool nonetheless.

I would highly recommend it to people who love a good "near future" scifi book.

I'm sure you know this, but I think "the author" Marvin Minsky should be mentioned by name since he was one of the foundational theorists in the field of AI in general, but particularly in NNs.

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