Thanks, I see. I agree that a lot of confusion could be avoided with clearer language, but I think at least that they’re not making as simple an error as you describe in the root comment. Ted does say in the EA Forum thread that they don’t believe brains operate at the Landauer limit, but I’ll let him chime in here if he likes.
I think the “effective FLOP” concept is very muddy, but I’m even less sure what it would mean to alternatively describe what the brain is doing in “absolute” FLOPs. Meanwhile, the model they’re using gives a relatively well-defined equivalence between the logical function of the neuron and modern methods on a modern GPU.
The statement about cost and energy efficiency as they elaborate in the essay body is about getting human-equivalent task performance relative to paying a human worker $25/hour, not saying that the brain uses five orders of magnitude less energy per FLOP of any kind. Closing that gap of five orders of magnitude could come either from doing less computation than the logical-equivalent-neural-network or from decreasing the cost of computation.
Thanks, I see. I agree that a lot of confusion could be avoided with clearer language, but I think at least that they’re not making as simple an error as you describe in the root comment. Ted does say in the EA Forum thread that they don’t believe brains operate at the Landauer limit, but I’ll let him chime in here if he likes.
I think the “effective FLOP” concept is very muddy, but I’m even less sure what it would mean to alternatively describe what the brain is doing in “absolute” FLOPs. Meanwhile, the model they’re using gives a relatively well-defined equivalence between the logical function of the neuron and modern methods on a modern GPU.
The statement about cost and energy efficiency as they elaborate in the essay body is about getting human-equivalent task performance relative to paying a human worker $25/hour, not saying that the brain uses five orders of magnitude less energy per FLOP of any kind. Closing that gap of five orders of magnitude could come either from doing less computation than the logical-equivalent-neural-network or from decreasing the cost of computation.