[11] Well, we’d definitely start with small brains and scale up, but we’d make sure to spend only a fraction of our overall compute on small brains. From the report, page 25 of part 3: “the number of FLOP/s contributed by humans is (~7e9 humans) * (~1e15 FLOP/s / person) = ~7e24. The human population is vastly larger now than it was during most of our evolutionary history, whereas it is likely that the population of animals with tiny nervous systems has stayed similar. This suggests to me that the average ancestor across our entire evolutionary history was likely tiny and performed very few FLOP/s. I will assume that the “average ancestor” performed about as many FLOP/s as a nematode and the “average population size” was ~1e21 individuals alive at a given point in time. This implies that our ancestors were collectively performing ~1e25 FLOP every second on average over the ~1 billion years of evolutionary history.”
[11] Well, we’d definitely start with small brains and scale up, but we’d make sure to spend only a fraction of our overall compute on small brains. From the report, page 25 of part 3: “the number of FLOP/s contributed by humans is (~7e9 humans) * (~1e15 FLOP/s / person) = ~7e24. The human population is vastly larger now than it was during most of our evolutionary history, whereas it is likely that the population of animals with tiny nervous systems has stayed similar. This suggests to me that the average ancestor across our entire evolutionary history was likely tiny and performed very few FLOP/s. I will assume that the “average ancestor” performed about as many FLOP/s as a nematode and the “average population size” was ~1e21 individuals alive at a given point in time. This implies that our ancestors were collectively performing ~1e25 FLOP every second on average over the ~1 billion years of evolutionary history.”