What about or (3) models that interact with the real world?
To be clear I also agree with your (1) and (2).
To be clear I also agree with your (1) and (2).
But the networking potential of digital compute is a fundamentally different paradigm than living systems. The human brain is constrained in size by the width of the female pelvis.
So while it's expensive, we can trade scope-constrained robustness (replication and redundancy at many levels of abstraction), for broader cognitive scale and fragility (data centers can't repair themselves and self-replicate).
Going to be interesting to see it all unfold... my bet is on stacking S-curves all the way.
Well, it _was_ until recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma
While the width is constrained by bipedal locomotion.
In what sense is this true? That sounds suspiciously like cubic meter of dirt is more advanced than an iPhone because there are 6-7 orders of magnitude more atoms in the dirt.
functional information is basically the amount of data (bits) necessary to explain all the possible functions matter can perform based on its unique configuration (in contrast to random). I am sure I partially butchered this explanation... but hopefully its close enough to catch my drift.
Life is optimized to process and learn from the real world, and it is insanely efficient at it and functional-information dense. (It might even be at the theoretical limit) Our most advanced technology is still 4-5 orders of magnitude behind it.
The capabilities of your iPhone are extremely narrow when compared to a handful of dirt. To you it may seem the opposite, but you are probably mixing up utility to you with functional capability. Your iPhone is has more functional utility to you, but the same amount dirt has way more general functional utility. (Your iphone isn't capable of self-replication, self-repair, and self-nonself distinction aka autopoiesis)
I believe you but I would love to know where this number came from just so I can read more about it
# If there are any bioinformaticians around please come eviscerate or confirm this calc #
Then compared it to TSMC 2nm research macro of (38.1 Mbit/mm^2) normalized to cell scale: 0.00019 Mbit/μm³
Living Cells: 1–10 Mbit/μm³
Current best chips: 0.00019 Mbit/μm³
I was also taking the information from a genome and then dividing it by the volume of a cell, but there are many instances of the genome in a cell. I didn't count all instances because they aren't unique.
There's a lot to unpack with this comparison and my approximation was crude, but the more I've dug into this comparison the more apparent how incredibly efficient life is at managing and processing and storing information. Especially if you also consider the amino acids, proteins, etc as information. No matter how you slice it, life seems orders of magnitude more efficient by every metric.
I'd like to think there's a paper somewhere where someone has carefully unpacked this and formally quantified it all.
I think this is an old belief that isn't supported by modern research.
From what I can tell, science used to point to this as the only/primary limit to human-brain size, but more recently the picture seems a lot less clear, with some indications that pelvis size doesn't place as hard of a constraint as we thought and there are other constraints such as metabolic (how many calories the mother can sustain during pregnancy and lactation).
So overall I'd say you are technically correct, even though this doesn't really materially change the point I was making; which is that the size of the human brain is constrained in ways that the size of data centers are not.
Having said that, I tend to agree that having AI interact with the world may be key: for one thing, I'm not sure whether there is any sense in which LLMs understand that most of the information content of language is about an external world.
What exactly are you considering a "data point"?
Are you assuming one model = one agent instance?
I am pretty sure that there is more information (molecular structure) and functional information (I(Ex )) just in the room I am sitting in than all the unique, useful, digitized information on earth.