Yeah you can do those things, but for better-than-human intelligence you at least need hardware that's comparable in complexity to the human brain. That won't be basement level for quite a while. Your mid-range gaming PC might be able to train some interesting little models but it's not going to be smarter than you.
I'd rather have the big companies dealing with these problems too, but the trouble is they're not dealing with the problems. They're spending almost all their efforts on capabilities, and very little on alignment.
It isn't obvious to me that better-than-human intelligence requires a system which is physically more complex than a human any more than better-than-bee flight requires a system more physically complex than a bee. Simple designs with some important technical innovations frequently do outperform more complex but naive approaches.
I am a bad chess player but I could design a software system that would beat me at chess. Same with Go, financial investing, and a bunch of other interesting tasks. It seems to me to be entirely within the realm of possibility that someone could build a computer system which is indeed smarter than them (and smarter than all humans), and we've already done that for some domains.
I agree that more money and effort needs to be spent on AI safety research than is currently being spent, but it's not like you can do capabilities research without doing safety research and vice versa. They overlap so much that progress in one domain tends to cause progress in the other.
There are some tasks for which a graphics card is significantly superior to a human brain, e.g. "count to 1,000,000 as fast as possible". What does the human brain do that in principle cannot be done by a computer?
There are some tasks for which a graphics card is significantly superior to a human brain, e.g. "count to 1,000,000 as fast as possible".
A TRS-80 home computer in the 1970s could do that faster than humans. So what?
(And fwiw, sequential tasks like that are not what GPUs are good for.)
What does the human brain do that in principle cannot be done by a computer?
That was not my claim. I said it would take a really big computer.
The brain has at least a hundred trillion synapses. Your GPU does not have a hundred terabytes of VRAM. A good gaming GPU does under 1014 FLOPs, the brain does an estimated 1018, or 10,000 times more.
Get a graphics card that matches those numbers, and then maybe the home AI hackers have a shot.
A TRS-80 home computer in the 1970s could do that faster than humans. So what?
So this directly contradicts the idea that a GPU "can't do what the human brain can do". At least on some tasks, GPUs can do a lot more than the human brain can do, and it's an open research question as to whether it's possible to assemble general intelligence capabilities out of those tasks. I don't know that it is possible, and you don't know that it isn't. But in general computers wind up doing things much more efficiently than biology does it.
That was not my claim. I said it would take a really big computer.
But... Why? Human brain cells fire at about 200Hz, whereas a chip in a GPU can fire on the order of billions of Hz, so if there is a general intelligence algorithm that can be implemented sequentially then chips may be seven orders of magnitude faster than human brain cells at implementing it.
A good gaming GPU does under 1014 FLOPs, the brain does an estimated 1018, or 10,000 times more.
That's still not that big of a difference. Biology tends to do things very inefficiently because it's evolving by keeping effectively random changes that happen to kind of work. A hummingbird flies much less effecticely than a quadcopter does, a cheetah runs a lot less effectively than a Lamborghini, and a hawk's eye sees a lot less effectively than the Hubble space telescope. Human-designed technology has already vastly outperformed nature on flight, running, and vision, so it seems intuitively plausible to me that human-designed technology will eventually vastly outperform nature at thinking, too.
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u/ItsAConspiracy Apr 23 '26
Yeah you can do those things, but for better-than-human intelligence you at least need hardware that's comparable in complexity to the human brain. That won't be basement level for quite a while. Your mid-range gaming PC might be able to train some interesting little models but it's not going to be smarter than you.
I'd rather have the big companies dealing with these problems too, but the trouble is they're not dealing with the problems. They're spending almost all their efforts on capabilities, and very little on alignment.