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> o1's performance increase did come with a time cost. It took 70 hours on the 400 public tasks compared to only 30 minutes for GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Sheesh. We're going to need more compute.



Polar icecaps shuddering at the thought


That is the next major challenge. Ok you can solve a logic puzzle with a gilzillon watts now go power that same level of compute with a cheese burger, or if you are vegan a nice salad.


Intelligence is something that gets monotone easier as compute increases and trivial at the large compute limit (for instance can brute force simulate a human at large enough compute). So increasing compute is the most sure way to ensure success at reaching above human level intelligence (agi)


This is…highly speculative and fairly ridiculous to anyone who’s attempted to do so


I'm giving a proof of a theoretical fact not saying it's feasible


proof + fact, and theoretical, are very different words, I'm really confused by your meaning here


>Intelligence is something that gets monotone easier as compute increases and trivial at the large compute limit (for instance can brute force simulate a human at large enough compute)

It gets monotone easier but the increase can be so slow that even using all the energy in the observable universe wouldn't make a meaningful difference, e.g. for problems in the exponential complexity class.


How does one "brute force simulate a human"? If compute is the limiting factor, then isn't it currently possible to brute force simulate a human, just extremely slowly?


I guess technically, one can try to simulate every single atoms and their interactions with each others to get this result.

However, considering how many atoms there are in a cubic foot of meat, this isn't very possible even with current compute. Even trying to solve a PDE with, I don't know, 1e7 factors, is already a hard to crack issue although technically, it is computable.

Now take that to the number of atoms in a meatbag and you quickly see why it is pointless to put any effort into this "extremely slowly" way.


We have no way of knowing the initial conditions for this (position etc of each fundamental particle in any brain), even if we assume that we have a good enough grasp on fundamental physics to know the rules.


But if we had enough compute, it'd be trivial, right? I mean, I didn't think so, but the guy I replied to seems to know so. No, in all seriousness, I realize that "extremely slowly" is an understatement.

In davidzheng's defense, I assume he likely meant a higher-level simulation of a human, one designed to act indistinguishably from an atom-level simulation.

I just think calling that "trivial with enough compute" is mistaking merely having the materials for having mastered them.


Something something monkey at a typewriter writing Shakespeare


This is a more water tight proof of the same fact (so we don't have to argue about physics)


It's not a proof at all.


Get out of my head!


Human brain has 1000 trillion synapses between 68 billion neurons. What are you going to simulate them on?

And it's not like you can copy brain's connectivity exactly. Such technologies don't exist.


I have a computer like that, embedded in my head even! It's good for real-time simulation, but has trouble simulating the same human from even a couple weeks before.

In all seriousness, it's simultaneously wondrous and terrifying to imagine the hypothetical tooling needed for such a simulation.


Now is a good time to spend with families and do work that feels satisfying. Much change is coming.




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