Ask HN: Is neuromorphic computing going to replace traditional AI?
Today AI relies heavily on super-dense layers, continuous computation of all layers and neurons at all times, and global backpropagation to find optimal weight updates. But when you look at the human brain, none of that happens.
The brain operates on principles that stand in contrast to modern LLMs:
- Local Evolution: Neurons are largely independent, evolving based on their local neighborhood and simple feedback loops like neurotransmitters (e.g., dopamine) rather than a global error signal. - Extreme Sparsity: The system is massively sparse (neurons only evolve and get updated when they have been involved in a firing-chain). - Event-Driven Processing: Neurons are only firing when they get evaluated and are actually triggered by other spiking neurons.
In contrast, current LLM‘s seem to me like they brute-force their way through problems by training all layers and neurons at the same time and trying to find the optimal global update function.
If you look at the trajectory of AI advancements over the last few years, a clear pattern emerges:
- 2020–2022: Scaling up datasets and raw compute. - 2023–2024: Expanding context windows and shifting to Mixture of Experts (MoE). - 2024–2025: Chain-of-thought and inference-time reasoning. - 2025–Present: Autonomous execution and parallel multi-agent systems.
Fundamentally, every single one of these advancements is just a different way of scaling up compute and processed tokens. So this scaling will naturally hit a wall at some point as electricity is not unlimited. That’s why I believe that long term progress can not come from just scaling forever. What it needs is radical efficiency improvements. So could neuromorphic processing be exactly that or is it not mature yet?