Katja Grace – Page 16

Neuron firing rates in humans

Our best guess is that an average neuron in the human brain transmits a spike about 0.1-2 times per second. Support Bias from neurons with sparse activity When researchers measure neural activity, they can fail to see neurons

Metabolic Estimates of Rate of Cortical Firing

Cortical neurons are estimated to spike around 0.16 times per second, based on the amount of energy consumed by the human neocortex. They seem unlikely to spike much more than once per second on average, based on this

Preliminary prices for human-level hardware

By Katja Grace, 4 April 2015 Computer hardware has been getting cheap now for about seventy five years. Relatedly, large computing projects can afford to be increasingly large. If you think the human brain is something like

Current FLOPS prices

In November 2017, we estimate the price for one GFLOPS to be between $0.03 and $3 for single or double precision performance, using GPUs (therefore excluding some applications). Amortized over three years, this is $1.1

The cost of TEPS

A billion Traversed Edges Per Second (a GTEPS) can be bought for around $0.26/hour via a powerful supercomputer, including hardware and energy costs only. We do not know if GTEPS can be bought more cheaply elsewhere. We estimate that

Allen, The Singularity Isn’t Near

The Singularity Isn’t Near is an article in MIT Technology Review by Paul Allen which argues that a singularity brought about by super-human-level AI will not arrive by 2045 (as is predicted by Kurzweil). The summarized argument

Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

The Singularity Is Near is a book by Ray Kurzweil. It argues that a technological singularity will occur in around 2045. This appears to be largely based on extrapolation from hardware in combination with a guess for how

Wikipedia history of GFLOPS costs

This is a list from Wikipedia, showing hardware configurations that authors claim perform efficiently, along with their prices per GFLOPS at different times in recent history. In it, prices generally fall at around an order of magnitude every five years, and

Trends in the cost of computing

Posted 10 Mar 2015 Computing power available per dollar has probably increased by a factor of ten roughly every four years over the last quarter of a century (measured in FLOPS or MIPS). Over the past 6-8 years, the

What’s up with nuclear weapons?

By Katja Grace, 27 February 2015 When nuclear weapons were first built, the explosive power you could extract from a tonne of explosive skyrocketed. But why? Here’s a guess. Until nuclear weapons, explosives were based on chemical reactions. Whereas

AI Impacts

Articles by Katja Grace