I don’t really know. My vague impression is that weird hardware could plausibly make many-orders-of-magnitude difference in energy consumption, but probably less overwhelming of a difference in other respects. Unless there’s an overwhelming quantum-computing speedup, but I consider that quite unlikely, like <5%. Again this is based on very little thought or research.
Maybe I’d be less surprised by a 100x speedup from GPU/TPU to custom ASIC than a 100x speedup from custom ASIC to photonic / neuromorphic / quantum / whatever. Just on the theory that GPUs are highly parallel, but orders of magnitude less parallel than the brain is, and a custom ASIC could maybe capture a lot of that difference. Maybe, I dunno, I could be wrong. A custom ASIC would not be much of a technological barrier the way weirder processors would be, although it could still be good for a year or two I guess, especially if you have cooperation from all the state-of-the-art fabs in the world...
I don’t really know. My vague impression is that weird hardware could plausibly make many-orders-of-magnitude difference in energy consumption, but probably less overwhelming of a difference in other respects. Unless there’s an overwhelming quantum-computing speedup, but I consider that quite unlikely, like <5%. Again this is based on very little thought or research.
Maybe I’d be less surprised by a 100x speedup from GPU/TPU to custom ASIC than a 100x speedup from custom ASIC to photonic / neuromorphic / quantum / whatever. Just on the theory that GPUs are highly parallel, but orders of magnitude less parallel than the brain is, and a custom ASIC could maybe capture a lot of that difference. Maybe, I dunno, I could be wrong. A custom ASIC would not be much of a technological barrier the way weirder processors would be, although it could still be good for a year or two I guess, especially if you have cooperation from all the state-of-the-art fabs in the world...