What good is learning software if you don't have the hardware to run it on (and probably wont for a decade) to attain even mammalian levels of intelligence?
Just like 10 years ago the only conceivable way of rendering diffuse light was with raytracing or radiosity simulations. Now we have modern techniques like ambient occlusion that makes it reasonably cheap to do in a rasterizer in realtime.
Obviously not the same thing as emulating the brain :-) but just what came to mind.
Here's hoping the brain is implemented in C ;-)
I think it'll work out. And a decade's not soooo long.
Big advances take time. I'm thrilled that Dustin and Founders Fund are willing to take on investments that have a long time horizon. That's where big breakthroughs will come from.
That's just one example. We're currently using a machine with 10k cores to model just a piece of the brain of a rat.
Neurons fire at up to 1kHz, which means, theoretically, that a modern 4-core CPU could potentially model 5 million neurons, in some sort of crazy 'breaking the laws of physics and ignoring synaptic modeling' scenario.
So then we would only need roughly 80 thousand cores to simulate the human brain, ignoring RAM.
Keep in mind that's an extremely rough (and terribly bad) guess, which makes a disgustingly bad number of broad assumptions that have no basis in reality. Its only purpose is to show how much better evolution is than us at computing.
I think you mean 1 kHz.