MIT boffins make AI chips '1 million times faster than the synapses in the human brain'

In the early days of AI research it was hoped that once electronics had equalled the ability of human synapses many problems would be solved. We've now gone way beyond that. A team at MIT reports that it has built AI chips that mimic synapses, but are a million times faster, and are additionally massively more energy efficient …

[Mike 137]

A million times faster

From the press release "arrays of programmable resistors in complex layers"

At last an approximation to the way the brain is physically constructed (subject to how interconnections are made and pruned, of course). However even given that, speed is not by any means the most important factor. Human synapses operate in the millisecond range, but that hasn't stopped the human brain at best coming up with incredible ideas and discoveries (including this one). We ought to consider (as a minimum) [a] the evolution of the brain in the context of human cultures and [b] the truly vast amount of incredibly diverse information that each individual brain is exposed to from (possibly even before) birth to the point where the human becomes quasi-autonomous. So there's much more to human intelligence that the wiring and speed of signalling. Nevertheless this is a potentially important contribution towards competent simulation of brain activity.

[LionelB]

Re: A million times faster

Fully agreed. What we lack almost entirely in our attempts at AI, is even an inkling of the organisational principles -- designed through aeons of evolutionary time, and trained through countless gazillions of lifetimes of experience -- that underpin the massively parallel computational problem-solving capabilities of natural neural systems.

Simply building bigger, faster, whizzier and bangier networks will not help until we have at least some understanding how to design and program the damn things. Convolutional Deep Networks are baby-steps along that route - not insignificant, but way, way off sufficient.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A million times faster

This is definitely a step in the right direction but you are right that speed is not the key to the human brain.

The key is plasticity.

Te brain's connectome, as we understand it, is that connections are being made, modified, prioritized, and removed constantly.

[zuckzuckgo]

Re: A million times faster

> speed is not the key to the human brain.

But scale might be. If one synthetic synapse is a million times faster than a natural one then it should be possible to use it to simulate a million natural synapses.

[Snowy]

Re: A million times faster

Not sure that is going to work given the scale of the problem.

On average, the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons and many more neuroglia which serve to support and protect the neurons. Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synapses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Super technology.......shame about the way the marketing comes over!

Quote: "...A team at MIT reports that it has built AI chips that mimic synapses, but are a million times faster..."

It's huge shame that this type of technology (see neural networks) is very poor at explaining just what was the logic behind a result.....

....so we know what the AI device reports as a conclusion.....but we never get to hear about the logic supporting the conclusion!!

Can real human beings get to check the logic? No!

So....unsupported conclusions....but a million times faster!!!

.....am I supposed to be impressed?

[LionelB]

Re: Super technology.......shame about the way the marketing comes over!

That is extremely naive. Bear in mind that human beings are not necessarily that great at explaining our own "logic".

For instance, can you explain to me precisely the logic you used to pick your sister's face out in a jostling crowd?

Another example: I am a mathematician. When I arrive at a new approach to attacking a problem, chances are I couldn't for the life of me explain how I got there - it seemed to crystallise out of a mess of half-formed, nebulous and abstract ideas floating around in my head (apropos of nothing, this usually happens in the shower, after a good night's sleep).

When a musician composes (or even just plays) a piece of music, do you imagine they can explain to you the logic behind accomplishing those things?

Do you think it is even possible to trace the dynamical logic behind the extraordinary feats of aerial manoeuvring performed by a bee, a housefly or a bat?

If you want a system which simply chugs through clearly differentiated logical pathways, you are talking about "expert systems". You can certainly explain how they arrive at a result - problem is expert systems turned out to be pretty rubbish at dealing with real-life problems (look up "GOFAI" - Good Old-Fashioned AI). That project died in the 80s, floundering in an ocean of combinatorial explosions. It is not how nature solves complex problems.

Future AI is not going to look like an expert system, and it is not going to tell you (or not very well, at any rate) how it does what it does. Get used to that.

[Mike 137]

Re: Super technology.......shame about the way the marketing comes over!

"it seemed to crystallise out of a mess of half-formed, nebulous and abstract ideas floating around in my head (apropos of nothing, this usually happens in the shower, after a good night's sleep)."

Indeed - that's intuition - arriving at a correct answer without recourse to conscious inference.

Many folks assume intuition equates to blind guesswork, but it's not the same at all. For intuition to operate, you have to be already in possession of the required information, you just may not consciously see how it all fits together. It's even possible that intuition is a fundamental (and maybe continuously operating) mental mechanism which is merely swamped or hidden by too much conscious analytical processing.

[LionelB]

Re: Super technology.......shame about the way the marketing comes over!

I'd go as far as to say that most of our mental life - and that certainly includes intelligent processing - is performed unconsciously. It feels like we are only able to apply a narrow focused attention at any one time to our own mental machinations.

[ravenviz]

Re: Super technology.......shame about the way the marketing comes over!

Your brain knows a lot that you don’t!

[Smeagolberg]

Re: Super technology.......shame about the way the marketing comes over!

>That is extremely naive. Bear in mind that human beings are not

>necessarily that great at explaining our own "logic".

True, but a system not being able to explain its logic does not imply that it is intelligent.

[LionelB]

Re: Super technology.......shame about the way the marketing comes over!

Obviously.

My point was, of course, the exact converse of that.

[zuckzuckgo]

Re: Super technology.......shame about the way the marketing comes over!

It does not need to be intelligent to be useful. There are many problems where the answer can be verified as correct, or good enough, without knowing the logic for solving it. That is one area where AI can be useful. Interestingly, the same can be said of quantum computers.

[Gene Cash]

If it's "difficult to reproduce" then it's not science

I think 90% of "AI" is just smoke and mirrors because they never release their training data, nor their training setup. It's as bad as the underpants gnomes.

[NXM]

efficiency

"massively more energy efficient than current designs"

I can do quite a lot of thinking when powered only by a pint of beer, which computers can't. Then again the conclusion I usually come to is that I need another beer.

[abstract]

The problem of artificial intelligence is that it is developed by idiots.

Things will change when AI will develop AI.

[ravenviz]

Re: The problem of artificial intelligence is that it is developed by idiots.

When AI develops volition then we have a problem!

[abstract]

Re: The problem of artificial intelligence is that it is developed by idiots.

You watch too much movies. Movies which by the way have a very bad understanding of all this and the problem it may represent. Even without a will a super AI would be super dangerous: how do you control what you don't understand?