The post mentions that the human brain’s learning algorithm is likely far more efficient but nowhere near optimal. While the AI hardware is remarkably powerful, the upper limits on machine intelligence is extremely high. Does it mean the AI hardware computational power make the efficiency gap less significant?
It means that in principle you can increase the intelligence of AIs by a very huge amount through software improvements alone. To the level that an AI running on a datacenter would be a superintelligence that can make technological progress at least hundreds of times faster than humanity. Aka that would be possible with superintelligently crafted software. It’s not saying we’ll get that before we have self-replicating AI-chip-manufacturing factories or so. Just saying the theoretical upper limits of software efficiency seem high.
Also tbc, you don’t necessarily get to hundreds of times technological progress with only human brain algorithms. But you probably get to tens of times with that.
Got it. The intuition is that we already have massive computational capacity and closing the software efficiency gap alone could significantly accelerate the intelligence explosion.
The post mentions that the human brain’s learning algorithm is likely far more efficient but nowhere near optimal. While the AI hardware is remarkably powerful, the upper limits on machine intelligence is extremely high. Does it mean the AI hardware computational power make the efficiency gap less significant?
I am not sure I fully understand your question.
It means that in principle you can increase the intelligence of AIs by a very huge amount through software improvements alone. To the level that an AI running on a datacenter would be a superintelligence that can make technological progress at least hundreds of times faster than humanity. Aka that would be possible with superintelligently crafted software. It’s not saying we’ll get that before we have self-replicating AI-chip-manufacturing factories or so. Just saying the theoretical upper limits of software efficiency seem high.
Also tbc, you don’t necessarily get to hundreds of times technological progress with only human brain algorithms. But you probably get to tens of times with that.
Got it. The intuition is that we already have massive computational capacity and closing the software efficiency gap alone could significantly accelerate the intelligence explosion.