Also, regarding the Landauer limit, human neurons propagate at approximately the speed of sound, not the speed of electricity.
The Landauer limit refers to energy consumption, not processing speed.
To me, this indicates we’re many orders of magnitude off the Landauer limit.
The main unknown quantity here is how many floating point operations per second the brain is equivalent to. George says 1016 in the debate, which I’d say is high by an OOM or two, but it’s not way off. Supposing that the brain is doing this at a power consumption of 20W, that puts it at around 4 OOM from the Landauer limit. (George claims 1 OOM, which is wrong.)
From my experience with 3D rendering, I’d say the visual fidelity of the worldmodel sitting in my sensorium at any given moment of walking around an open environment would take something on the order of ~200x250W GPUs to render, so that’s 50KW just for that. And that’s probably a low estimate.
Then consider that my brain is doing a large number of other things, like running various internal mathematical, relational, and language models that I can’t even begin to imagine analogous power consumption for. So, let’s just say at least 200KW to replicate a human brain in current silicon as just a guess.
The Landauer limit refers to energy consumption, not processing speed.
The main unknown quantity here is how many floating point operations per second the brain is equivalent to. George says 1016 in the debate, which I’d say is high by an OOM or two, but it’s not way off. Supposing that the brain is doing this at a power consumption of 20W, that puts it at around 4 OOM from the Landauer limit. (George claims 1 OOM, which is wrong.)
From my experience with 3D rendering, I’d say the visual fidelity of the worldmodel sitting in my sensorium at any given moment of walking around an open environment would take something on the order of ~200x250W GPUs to render, so that’s 50KW just for that. And that’s probably a low estimate.
Then consider that my brain is doing a large number of other things, like running various internal mathematical, relational, and language models that I can’t even begin to imagine analogous power consumption for. So, let’s just say at least 200KW to replicate a human brain in current silicon as just a guess.
(The visual fidelity is a very small fraction of what we actually think it is—the brain lies to us about how much we perceive.)