[HN Gopher] Neuromorphic computing
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Neuromorphic computing
Author : LAsteNERD
Score : 47 points
Date : 2025-06-05 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lanl.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lanl.gov)
| datameta wrote:
| I could be mistaken with this nitpick but isn't there a unit
| mismatch in "...just 20 watts--the same amount of electricity
| that powers two LED lightbulbs for 24 hours..."?
| rcoveson wrote:
| Just 20 watts, the same amount of electricity that powers 2 LED
| lightbulbs for 24 hours, one nanosecond, or twelve-thousand
| years.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| There is indeed; Watts aren't energy, and it's a common enough
| mistake that Technology Connections made a pretty good 52
| minute video about it the other month [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc
| ge96 wrote:
| Just searched against HN, seems this term is at least 8 years old
| lukeinator42 wrote:
| The term neuromorphic? It was coined in 1990:
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/58356
| newfocogi wrote:
| Once again, I am quite surprised by the sudden uptick of AI
| content on HN coming out of LANL. Does anyone know if its just
| getting posted to HN and staying on the first page suddenly, or
| is this a change in strategy for the lab? Even so, I don't see
| the other NatLabs showing up like this.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I imagine the mood at the national labs right now is pretty
| panicky. They will be looking to get involved with more real-
| world applications than they traditionally have been, and will
| also want to appear more engaged with trendy technologies.
| gyrovagueGeist wrote:
| I am not sure why HN has mostly LANL posts. Otherwise though it
| is a combination of things. Machine learning applications for
| NATSec & fundamental research have become more important (see
| FASST, proposed last year), the current political environment
| makes AI funding and applications more secure and easier to
| chase, and some of this is work that has already been going on
| but getting greater publicity for both of those reasons.
| ivattano wrote:
| The primary pool of money for DOE labs is through a program
| called "Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science,
| Security and Technology (FASST)," replacing the Exascale
| Computing Project. Compared to other labs, LANL historically
| does not have many dedicated ML/AI groups but they have
| recently spun up an entire branch to help secure as much of
| that FASST money as possible.
| fintler wrote:
| Probably because they're hosting an exascale-class cluster with
| a bazillion GH200s. Also, they launched a new "National
| Security AI Office".
| geeunits wrote:
| I've been building a 'neuromorphic' kernel/bare metal OS that
| operates on mac hardware using APL primitives as its core layer.
| Time is considered another 'position' and the kernel itself is
| vector oriented using 4d addressing with a 32x32x32 'neural
| substrate'.
|
| I am so ready and eager for a paradigm shift of hardware &
| software. I think in the future 'software' will disappear for
| most people, and they'll simply ask and receive.
| JimmyBuckets wrote:
| I'd love to read more about this. Do you have a blog?
| kokanee wrote:
| Philosophical thought: if the aim of this field is to create an
| artificial human brain, then it would be fair to say that the
| more advanced the field becomes, the less difference there is
| between the artificial brain and a real brain. This begs two
| questions:
|
| 1) Is the ultimate form of this technology ethically
| distinguishable from a slave?
|
| 2) Is there an ethical difference between bioengineering an
| actual human brain for computing purposes, versus constructing a
| digital version that is functionally identical?
| russdill wrote:
| Disagree. It would be like saying the more advanced
| transportation becomes, then more like a horse it will be.
| thechao wrote:
| Shining-brass 25 ton, coal-powered, steam-driven autohorse! 8
| legs! Tireless! Breathes fire!
| ge96 wrote:
| 3) can we use a dead person's brain, hook up wires to it and
| oxygen, why not
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I am certain this answer will change as generations pass. The
| current generations, us, will say that there is a difference.
| Once a generation of kids grow up with AI
| assistants/friends/partners/etc... they will have a different
| view. They will demand rights and protections for their AI.
| energy123 wrote:
| We should start by disambiguating intelligence and qualia. The
| field is trying to create intelligence, and kind of assuming
| that qualia won't be created alongside it.
| falcor84 wrote:
| How would you go about disambiguating them? Isn't that
| literally the "hard problem of consciousness" [0]?
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
| feoren wrote:
| "Qualia" is a meaningless term made up so that philosophers
| can keep publishing meaningless papers. It's completely
| unfalsifiable: there is no test you can even theoretically
| run to determine the existence or nonexistence of qualia.
| There's never a reason to concern yourself with it.
| drdeca wrote:
| The test I use to determine that there exist qualia is
| "looking". Now, whether there is a test I can do to confirm
| that there is any that anything(/anyone) _other than me_
| experiences, is another question. (I don't see how there
| could be such a test, but perhaps I just don't see it.)
|
| So, probably not really falsifiable in the sense you are
| considering, yeah.
|
| I don't think that makes it meaningless, nor a worthless
| idea. It probably makes it not a scientific idea?
|
| If you care about subjective experiences, it seems to make
| sense that you would then concern oneself with subjective
| experiences.
|
| For the great lookup table Blockhead, whose memory banks
| take up a galaxy's worth of space, storing a lookup table
| of responses for any possible partial conversation history
| with it, should we value not "hurting its feelings"? If
| not, why not? It responds just like how a person in an
| online one-on-one chat would.
|
| Is "Is this [points at something] a moral patient?" a
| question amenable to scientific study? It doesn't seem like
| it to me. How would you falsify answers of "yes" or "no"?
| But, I refuse to reject the question as "meaningless".
| layer8 wrote:
| The term has some validity as a word for what I take to be
| the inner perception of processes within the brain. The
| qualia of a scent, for example, can be taken to refer to
| the inner processing of scent perception giving rise to a
| secondary perception of that processing (or other side
| effects of that processing, like evoking associated
| memories). I strongly suspect that that's what's actually
| going on when people talk about how it feels like to see
| red, and the like.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Drinking from the eliminativist hose, are we?
|
| You can't be serious. Whatever one wishes to say about the
| framing, you cannot deny conscious experience. Materialism
| painted itself into this corner through its bad
| assumptions. Pretending it hasn't produced this problem for
| itself, that it doesn't exist, is just plain silly.
|
| Time to show some intellectual integrity and revisit those
| assumptions.
| falcor84 wrote:
| In my opinion, one of the best works of fiction exploring this
| is qntm's "Lena" - https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
| antithesizer wrote:
| *shower thought
| layer8 wrote:
| For most applications, we don't want "functionally identical".
| We do not want it to have its own desires and a will of its
| own, biological(-analogous) needs, having a circadian rhythm,
| getting tired and needing sleep, being subject to mood changes
| and emotional swings, feeling pain, having a sexual drive,
| needing recognition and validation, and so on. So we don't want
| to copy the neural and bodily correlates that give rise to
| those phenomena, which arguably are not essential to how the
| human brain manages to have the intelligence it has. That is
| likely to drastically change the ethics of it. We will have to
| learn more about how those things work in the brain to avoid
| the undesirables.
| kokanee wrote:
| If we back away from philosophy and think like engineers, I
| think you're entirely right and the question _should_ be
| moot. I can 't help but think, though, that in spite of it
| all, the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans of the future will not be
| stopped from attempting to create something indistinguishable
| from flesh and blood.
| tough wrote:
| I mean have you watched Westworld?
| dlivingston wrote:
| To 1) and 2), assuming a digital consciousness capable of self-
| awareness and introspection, I think the answer is clearly
| 'no'.
|
| But:
|
| > it would be fair to say that the more advanced the field
| becomes, the less difference there is between the artificial
| brain and a real brain.
|
| I don't think it would be fair to say this. LLMs are certainly
| not worthy of ethical considerations. Consciousness needs to be
| demonstratable. Even if the synaptic structure of the digital
| vs. human brain approaches 1:1 similarity, the program running
| on it does not deserve ethical consideration unless and until
| consciousness can be demonstrated as an emergent property.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| The burden of proof is to show that there is any real or
| substantive similarity between the two beyond some superficial
| comparisons and numbers. If you can't provide that, then you
| can't answer those questions meaningfully.
|
| (Frankly, this is all a category mistake. Human minds possess
| intentionality. They possess semantic apprehension. Computers
| are, by definition, abstract mathematical models that are
| purely syntactic and formal and therefore stripped of semantic
| content and intentionality. That is exactly what allows
| computation to be 'physically realizable' or 'mechanized',
| whether the simulating implementation is mechanical or
| electrical or whatever. There's a good deal of ignorant and
| wishy-washy magical thinking in this space that seems to draw
| hastily from superficial associations like "both (modern)
| computers and brains involve electrical phenomena" or
| "computers (appear to) calculate, and so do human beings", and
| so on.)
| Footpost wrote:
| Neuromorphic computation has been hyped up for ~ 20 year by now.
| So far it has dramatically underperformed, at least vis-a-vis the
| hype.
|
| The article does not distinguish between training and inference.
| Google Edge TPUs https://coral.ai/products/ each one is capable
| of performing 4 trillion operations per second (4 TOPS), using 2
| watts of power--that's 2 TOPS per watt. So _inference_ is already
| cheaper than the 20 watts the paper attributes to the brain. To
| be sure, LLM _training_ is expensive, but so is raising a child
| for 20 years. Unlike the child, LLMs can share weights, and
| amortise the energy cost of training.
|
| Another core problem with neuromorphic computation is that we
| currently have no meaningful idea how the brain produces
| intelligence, so it seems to be a bit premature to claim we can
| copy this mechanism. Here is what the Nvidia Chief Scientist B.
| Dally (and one of the main developers of modern GPU
| architectures) says about the subject: _" I keep getting those
| calls from those people who claim they are doing neuromorphic
| computing and they claim there is something magical about it
| because it's the way that the brain works ... but it's truly more
| like building an airplane by putting feathers on it and flapping
| with the wings!"_ From "Hardware for Deep Learning" HotChips 2023
| keynote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsxCZAE8QNA This is at
| 21:28. The whole talk is brilliant and worth watching.
| stefanv wrote:
| And still no mention of Numenta... I've always felt it's an
| underrated company, built on an even more underrated theory of
| intelligence
| esafak wrote:
| I want them to succeed but it's been two decades already. Maybe
| they should have started with a less challenging problem to
| grow the company?
| meindnoch wrote:
| They will be right on time when the first Mill CPU arrives!
| random3 wrote:
| memristors are back
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