(I’ve only skimmed/talked to Claude about this post, so apologies if this was already discussed/addressed; also: cross-posted from some Slack/Signal groups on WBE and AI safety.)
Computational requirements for various [especially hi-fi] WBE simulation levels might make applicability to automated safety research mostly useless (even supposing the rest of the technical problems were solved, e.g. scanning, synapse tracing, etc.). E.g. looking at table 9 from page 80 of the WBE roadmap and assuming roughly 10^22 FLOP total computational power available worldwide (see e.g. https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/ai_timelines/hardware_and_ai_timelines/computing_capacity_of_all_gpus_and_tpus): if a spiking neural network simulation is required, this would only allow for < 10,000 automated (WBE) safety researchers; not bad, but not a huge gain in numbers either (compared to current numbers of safety researchers). And it gets (much) worse with more detailed levels of simulation: the next level (electrophysiology) would allow for <=1 WBE. So I think this weakens the appeal of hi-fi WBEs (for which I don’t think the arguments were a slamdunk even to begin with) even more.
(I’ve only skimmed/talked to Claude about this post, so apologies if this was already discussed/addressed; also: cross-posted from some Slack/Signal groups on WBE and AI safety.)
Computational requirements for various [especially hi-fi] WBE simulation levels might make applicability to automated safety research mostly useless (even supposing the rest of the technical problems were solved, e.g. scanning, synapse tracing, etc.). E.g. looking at table 9 from page 80 of the WBE roadmap and assuming roughly 10^22 FLOP total computational power available worldwide (see e.g. https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/ai_timelines/hardware_and_ai_timelines/computing_capacity_of_all_gpus_and_tpus): if a spiking neural network simulation is required, this would only allow for < 10,000 automated (WBE) safety researchers; not bad, but not a huge gain in numbers either (compared to current numbers of safety researchers). And it gets (much) worse with more detailed levels of simulation: the next level (electrophysiology) would allow for <=1 WBE.
So I think this weakens the appeal of hi-fi WBEs (for which I don’t think the arguments were a slamdunk even to begin with) even more.