A Skeptical Reaction To IBM's Cat Brain Simulation Claims

kreyszig writes "The recent story of a cat brain simulation from IBM had me wondering if this was really possible as described. Now a senior researcher in the same field has publicly denounced IBM's claims." More optimisticaly, dontmakemethink points out an "astounding article about new 'Neurogrid' computer chips which offer brain-like computing with extremely low power consumption. In a simulation of 55 million neurons on a traditional supercomputer, 320,000 watts of power was required, while a 1-million neuron Neurogrid chip array is expected to consume less than one watt."

The power of custom silicon

[jabuzz]

If you have custom silicon to do each neuron then you are going to be hugely more power efficient that a general purpose processor simulating a neuron in software. There is nothing new there and anyone who thinks otherwise is just clueless. Given IBM have the facilities and resources to fabricate some custom silicon I fail to see the issue.

Skeptical?

[golden age villain]

This IBM announcement was just ridiculous. To cite only one argument, the brain does not consist only of neurons. It contains at least as many other cells which are also involved in signal processing. Mohda would be laughed at in any neuroscience conference and he certainly doesn't help the cause of theoreticians in the neuroscience field by making such stupid announcements. Eugene Izhikevich who designed the neuron model being used for these simulations had a PNAS paper not too long ago modeling the entire human brain and he did not claim that he successfully modeled the human brain. Plus no one has any clue how the brain computes really so making a claim about the formation of thoughts is just nonsense.

Re:nonlinear

[gnick]

You assume all neurons are connected to all other neurons. My brain does not work like that...

Are you sure? I know that all of the neurons in your brain are not directly connected, but that doesn't imply that there's no path between them. So, while the power consumption involved with neuron interaction may not increase quite as much per added neuron as if you had direct connections between each of them, it still seems that it would be more complicated than a direct linear correlation.

Not surprised, remember Deep Blue?

[NapalmScatterBrain]

IBM has a known history of making overblown claims. This is what happens when you let your PR mesh with your technical research. Deep Blue was a giant PR stunt, and they had humans retooling the code in between matches. What a crock. When they get a robot that catches mice, purrs, and jumps on the table to eat my burger when I leave the room for 2 seconds, maybe then I'll believe it.

Re:Brain Power

[hattig]

Their chip uses 340 transistors to model a neuron, and has 65536 neurons.

That means it has ~22m transistors for neurons, although there certainly more transistors managing non-neuron aspects.

It looks like it was made on a 130nm - 250nm process for the die size.

Shrink that to 45nm once the technology is proven, and you'll have 8 to 32 times as many neurons in a single chip. That's 512Ki to 2Mi neurons per chip.

A chip makes up a neural cluster, and you use multiple chips to simulate multiple neural clusters, like a brain. They're using 16 chips at the moment for 1Mi neurons. They'll get to 64Mi neurons easily, and with more clusters, 1Bi doesn't seem out of the question in a few years.

Emo Philips

[Temujin_12]

"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this."

Who cares what consciousness is

[wurp]

I think we want a system that we can ask to do a complex task in natural language, and which will perform the task, only asking for further instruction when what we've told it is sufficiently ambiguous.

I suspect consciousness will be a byproduct in such a system (as it is in us), but to me, consciousness is not the goal. In fact, if we could achieve it without consciousness, that would be better, since a whole swath of ethical issues in AI go away.

Which reminds me of something else I thought yesterday regarding this: is anyone considering the ethical issues?

I don't think this simulation approaches the trouble spot yet, but at some point we have a good enough simulation of a brain that we're essentially maintaining a sentient creature in an environment with very limited stimuli (a torture in itself) with a half-functioning brain. I'm sure we'd decide that what we learn is worth it, but we should at least acknowledge the issue.

Eventually, it's going to be a simulation of a human we're torturing for science.

Re:All those neurons using less than 1 watt?

[dontmakemethink]

Actually if you read TFA, the long-pondered question of why humans only use 1-15% of their brain is largely a matter of power consumption, and the reason for the abundance of dormant neurons is for greater potential diversity of thought.

"While accounting for just 2 percent of our body weight, the human brain devours 20 percent of the calories that we eat."

"The brain achieves optimal energy efficiency by firing no more than 1 to 15 percent—and often just 1 percent—of its neurons at a time."

That seems to indicate that a human brain would burn more calories than the rest of the body if it were "always on".

Being a hypoglycemia sufferer, I can attest to the severe limitations of brain activity when deprived of sugar. Before being diagnosed I underwent tunnel vision and black-outs, not to mention the typical mood swings, shakiness, cold sensations, etc.

Never has my nickname been more appropriate...